Community members lead effort to clean up trash pile outside vacant Sears store

City of Yuma claims property owners ignored issue for weeks - Fox 9's Adam Klepp reports

YUMA, AZ (KYMA-TV, KECY-TV) - An unsightly pile of trash outside Yuma's vacant Sears store has community members are taking matters into their own hands.

Locals reached out to Fox 9's Adam Klepp to describe the pile, and the problems they had tracking down the people responsible for it. There's a banner nearby with a local realtor’s name and real estate company on it , but neither are responsible for the garbage.

Randall Christ with the Yuma City Building Safety Department says the property is owned by Seritage SRC Finance LLC. Christ says, it's responsible for the trash. He says his department issued a non-compliance notice to Seritage back on September 20th. The company finally more than 3-weeks later, on October 12th.

"The property owner did reach out to [us] and has agreed they need to clean the property," Crist said. "[They] will be working with their property management company to get the mess cleaned up."

If Seritage does not clean up the pile, the city needs to submit two more code violations before it can take action. That process that could take another 20 business days.

For now, locals are taking it upon themselves to clean up the mess.

"As community members we can wait, but the problem is getting worse," community member Paul Zimmerman said. "So hopefully a bunch of us can get together on Friday and we’re gonna clean up the mess.”

While the city says it has heard back from Seritage regarding plans to clean up the trash, News 11 has not heard back from the company regarding our request for comment. We want to know why it took so long for the company to respond to the city's notices, and why it hasn't come up with a formal plan to clean up the trash.

The community clean-up will take place Friday, October 14th at 9 a.m.