VALLEY GRANDE — Members of the Valley Grande city council are close to drafting and voting on an ordinance regarding the appearance and upkeep of properties in the city.

During Monday’s city council meeting, Mayor Wayne Labbe said he would be working with city clerk Janet Frasier next week to draft an ordinance for the council to look over and later vote on.

“We are just trying to put together an ordinance that fits us,” Labbe said. “We are a rural community, but we want to apply this to the extreme cases we run into.”

Labbe said complaints from residents about the appearance of several yards in the community spurred the recent effort to research and eventually craft an ordinance.

“If you’ve got somebody working on three or four cars in their own backyard, so what? But if the cars are lining up in the front yard and grass is growing up around them, that needs to be addressed,” Labbe said. “We’ve got to be real careful and real precise with the definitions when we go to put this ordinance together.”

During the council’s previous meeting, Labbe and council members were given ordinances from other communities and were asked to read them and highlight the language they wanted to be included in the ordinance for their own community.

Labbe said the council looked over standing ordinances from Trussville, Decatur, Rainsville and Phenix City.

“We are a country city, and everybody wants to keep it that way and do their own thing, but there again, people’s property has been devalued by things going on,” said council member Jane Craig. “People have a lot of extra work that goes on behind their houses and people live beside them. That has a tendency to be a problem when their neighbor goes to sell their house and it scares buyers away.”

Labbe said he and the council will take the concerns of people on both sides of the argument into consideration when finalizing the language of the ordinance.

“We don’t want to be too stringent because we are still rural. You don’t want to take away somebody’s livelihood on either side,” Labbe said. “It’s a matter of us being fair with the citizens. We have only planned to address the extreme cases, and that is why we’ll also have to identify what is extreme.”

The council’s next meeting is scheduled to take place at on June 16.