By Ashley Toland Editor

What the cluck is going on in Cypress Shores neighborhood?

In the new thriller “Lakeview Terrace,” Samuel L. Jackson plays the quintessential “neighbor from hell,” who mercilessly terrorizes the couple next door with spotlights and garden tools.

Far from the silver screens of Hollywood, John Wink of the Cypress Shores community says he has “a neighbor belched out of the bowels of hell,” whose terror comes in the form of chickens, goats, painted ceramics and tires.

Wink and many of his neighbors on Patricia Drive, off Rangeline Road in District 4, say Kathy Lathan has turned their neighborhood into a “cauldron of animosity and hate,” as conflicting zoning laws and municipal code ordinances have allowed Lathan to turn her seven-acre property in an R-1 residential neighborhood into something rivaling Old McDonald’s farm.

However, none of her neighbors are singing E-I-E-I-O.

Instead, Wink and a group of about 8-10 neighbors pleaded with the Mobile City Council Sept. 16 to please help them resolve this matter that has caused tempers to flare, numerous verbal altercations and more than 100 calls and complaints to the Mobile 311 system, who neighbors claim are in collusion with the Lathans, an allegation the city flatly denies.

Fuzzy Laws

Barbara Drummond, Executive Director of Administrative Services for the city, says the laws are “fuzzy” and the city’s legal department is currently reviewing the situation.

Under the zoning ordinances, having livestock within the city limits in a residential (R-1) neighborhood is strictly prohibited.

“If you call Urban Development and ask them if you can have farm animals at 3875 Patricia Drive, Mobile, AL 36619, (Lathan’s address) they will tell you, ‘no you cannot.’ That was what I did last week and got that answer. We live in zone R1 not RA,” explains April Doutt who also lives on Patricia Drive.

The “loophole” comes under Municipal Code Ordinance 64-003, where livestock is allowed to be kept inside the city limits if the property and animal pens/corrals/stables or other confinement areas meet certain space and structural requirements. A health officer must come out and make sure the property is in compliance with the provisions outlined in the ordinance, and if it is, the officer must issue a permit allowing the animals. The ordinance states the property must be continually maintained in this manner.

Lathan has a permit for about a dozen chickens and seven goats.

Doutt and her neighbors believe the zoning law should supercede this ordinance, and the city should recognize it, rather than let Lathan seemingly maneuver her way around it. But Doutt says Lathan does not follow the guidelines of the ordinance anyway.

“She has a chicken coop in her front yard that she moves them out to, and the ordinance clearly says a chicken house has to be attached to a chicken yard, and this is not,” Doutt says.

Lathan has told the media she uses that cage or “day pen” to keep the chickens in when she is cleaning their coop in the back yard, and it also keeps them healthier by allowing them to “peck around different grasses and bugs.”

Doutt and Wink allege she uses this “day pen” to goad them, by always seeming to “parade the chickens up and down the street” when neighbors have special events at one of their homes or when a realtor holds an open house in a nearby home for sale.

And the goading has not stopped with the “parade of chickens,” according to neighbors. After they complained about the livestock, she planted tires on the edge of her expansive property, far out of sight from her house, but directly across from the front porches of several of the neighbors. They all must drive by these “decorations” on the way to their homes.

The neighbors say it was just black tires stuck in the ground and cut up beer cans hanging in the trees at first. They claim when they called 311, city officials came out and told her she had to move them out of the right of way, which she did, and then told her if she wanted to keep them in her yard she needed to decorate them, which she did. The neighbors question why the city would encourage this.

There are now tires painted with yellow and red polka dots lining the street, along with a ceramic cat and pig, which are also painted in bright colors, as well as an array of poinsettias, artificial flowers, a ceramic jack-o-lantern and other trinkets scattered just beyond the right of way. Just above these “decorations,” there are (newly-painted) shredded beer cans and fabric hanging from the trees.

The neighbors feel these decorations might as well be a large polka-dotted middle finger pointed at them.

Lathan has told reporters she thinks the decorations look “good.”

Barbara Drummond says the city absolutely did not encourage Lathan to decorate these items and says they have only tried to help “diffuse a very volatile situation.” She says their hands are tied as far as what she puts on her private property as decoration, as those types of issues are governed by neighborhood covenants.

“So I guess someone could paint an old toilet and stick a plant in it and call it a decorative planter,” Wink mused in front of the council.

Doutt says they do have a neighborhood covenant that prohibits not only the decorations but also the livestock, but it would require the neighbors to personally pay for an attorney out of their own pockets to press the issue.

“Why should we all have to pay for an attorney when there are laws saying she can’t have livestock on her property?” Doutt asks.

Wink said he supported annexation when Cypress Shores was brought into the city in the early ‘90s, and protection from exactly this kind of thing was what he expected when he cast his vote.

Drummond says she thinks there needs to be a “cooling off period” for all of the parties involved, which she hopes will come while the administration is trying to figure out the legal issues.

Grandfathering in some of the existing animals may be a part of this resolution, which terrifies the neighbors.

“She has already applied for a cow and some peacocks,” Doutt says.

Drummond says they hope to have something back on the council agenda by late October or early November.

Ashley Toland is Lagniappe editor. Contact her at ashleytoland@lagniappemobile.com.

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