SPARKS — One day on her way to work, Linda Patterson noticed several yards tangled with overgrown weeds. The Sparks city clerk had seen years of budget cuts devastate Sparks’ code enforcement division, which is now down to one officer. So, Patterson decided to take matters into her own hands.

“The one thing that makes Sparks special is that we have a sense of community,” she said. “I sure wouldn’t want to lose that because of an economic issue.”

She decided to start her community activism with the weeds.

A force of Patterson plus one volunteer have devised a plan to select an area of town and drive the streets to see which houses have weed problems. The volunteer will then snap a picture of the house, write down the address and take her information back to city hall. According to city code, it is a public nuisance violation to have weeds growing more than 8 inches tall in front of a Sparks residence.

Once the violating weeds have been identified, Patterson will send a letter to the homeowner informing them of the city code and asking them to clean up the problem within 15 days.

The first neighborhood on the program was bounded between Prater Way on the north, Victorian Avenue on south, Pyramid Way on the west and McCarran Boulevard on the east.

In their first wave of code enforcement investigations, 20 of the 22 homes with weed problems cleaned up their yards.

The next stop for the program will be the neighborhood from Queen Way to McCarran Boulevard on the north and south and Pyramid Way to Probasco Way on the east and west, according to city staff reports.

“Neighbors can get aggravated because they want their neighborhood to look nice,” Patterson said.

She added that yards full of broken down cars and outside trash hoarding mean that the city’s one code enforcement officer has “bigger things to deal with than weeds.”

The neighborhoods targeted for the volunteer weed abatement program were identified through complaints Patterson received through the city’s website. Most of the code enforcement complaints concern trailers, beaten down cars and large trash heaps parked in front yards, she said. However, Patterson added that on Wednesday alone, the city got five online complaints about weeds.

Sparks has chipped in $100 to the effort, paying for the cost of paper, copying and postage to mail the letters.

While the program plans to mainly target the older areas of Sparks, Patterson said the sky is the limit for the volunteers and their code enforcement reach.

“We want to make sure that neighborhoods are friendly for families,” she said. “It is not very friendly to have weeds everywhere, is it?”

Under Sparks city code, “Public nuisance” means any of the following:

Attractive nuisance: Any area, structure or object which by its nature, location and/or character would tend to attract and endanger the safety of any minor person.

Polluted water: Any body of water which by its nature and/or location constitutes an unhealthy or unsafe condition.

Refuse and waste: Any material, regardless of its market value, which, by reason of its location and/or character, is unsightly or interferes with the reasonable use and enjoyment of adjacent properties; or which has a detrimental effect upon adjacent property values; or which would hamper or interfere with the containment of fire upon the premises.

Nuisances in general: Any act or condition which, by reason of its nature, character and/or location, interferes with the reasonable use and enjoyment of adjacent properties; or which has a detrimental effect upon adjacent property values. Nuisances in general include, but are not limited to, weeds and turf grass in plain view within the front yard exceeding 8 inches in height; graffiti; walls, fences or other structures that are decaying, cracking, peeling, chalking, dry rot, warping or infested with termites; motor vehicles parked within the front yard area on an unpaved surface; construction equipment and other commercial vehicles, supplies or machinery stored in a residential zone not approved for temporary construction; garbage cans or trash receptacles kept long-term in a front yard; front yard paving after March 21, 2006 other than the area between a lot’s driveway and the lot’s nearest property line; and placing portable sporting equipment in the public right-of-way.