Neighbors at a Texas Air Force Base say that they have seen poisonous snakes and scorpions hiding in waist-high weeds and grass in base neighborhoods where landscaping crews have not worked in over a month.
Families at Lackland Air Force Base, which is home to Air Force basic training, shared photos with Task & Purpose of waist-high grass that residents say has been allowed to grow by base housing officials since the first week of May.
“The last time they mowed in my neighborhood was 4 May,” one resident told Task & Purpose. “The grass overall is overgrown, but in most places it’s at least 2-5 feet tall.”
Task & Purpose spoke to three residents, all of whom requested anonymity due to fears of retaliation. Each reported similar conditions in two of the bases’ largest neighborhoods for enlisted housing.
“Residents have already had an uptick in snakes in their yard with multiple coral snakes. The flies and mosquitoes are bad,” said one resident.
At least one three-man landscaping crew had begun to cut some areas of overgrown grass on Monday, residents said, after dozens of posts about the conditions appeared on the amn/nco/snco Facebook page over the weekend. But the sheer bulk of the grass will be an issue until it’s hauled away, one resident pointed out, with the emergence in South Texas of the flesh-eating screwworm fly.
“There’s going to be so much grass on the ground that the flies are going to be terrible,” a resident said.
Residents who spoke to Task & Purpose said that the runaway weeds and landscaping are mostly within the Airman Scott, North Wheery and the Frank Tejeda East and West neighborhoods, which are managed by Balfour Beatty, a private contractor that operates housing at at least 55 military bases, according to the company’s website. A spokesperson for the company said they were working on the issue.
“We know residents have been frustrated by the condition of landscaping in some [of] the family housing areas at Lackland, and we share those concerns. The previous contractor did not meet performance expectations despite repeated efforts to improve the quality of their work, and the contract was ultimately terminated,” the spokesperson said in an email. “A new contractor is now in place, but delays in obtaining base access for their employees have slowed the transition and caused some services, particularly grass cutting, to fall behind schedule.”
Officials with the 502nd Air Base Wing, which provides installation support for several bases around San Antonio, did not return emails and phone calls from Task & Purpose.
But even areas that crews had begun to chop away at on Tuesday remained thick with overgrown weeds. Post-cutting photos sent to Task & Purpose of a playground in one housing area, known as the Blue Playground on base maps, continued to show weeds and grass taller than the four-foot fence that surrounds the play equipment. An access trail to the playground was surrounded by growth that appeared to be two- and three-feet high.
“Sidewalks, pathways, random green areas where kids all play, but that has all been overgrown,” the resident said.
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Under base housing rules, residents said, Balfour Beatty crews handle landscaping for all housing neighborhoods except for areas behind fences at individual homes, such as a fenced-off backyard. Airmen who live on base housing are given Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), but that sum of money is automatically turned over to housing companies as rent, ostensibly to cover water, utilities and other public works services, including landscaping.
With landscaping covered in the neighborhood, most residents do not own lawncare tools like lawnmowers.
“They take our entire BAH,” one resident said. “At least they could do the landscaping.”
All of the photos sent to Task & Purpose were taken in two neighborhoods on the base’s southeast side that cater to enlisted families, though conditions are better elsewhere on base, one resident said.
“Officer housing looks gorgeous,” they said. “I drove by earlier to see.”
