Greenville Cracks Down on Mosquito Population

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With Alabama’s warm winter and heavy rains, this summer might be a good one for mosquitoes. The city of Greenville is hoping to keep its pest population down by strictly enforcing a city ordinance.

That ordinance, according to Mayor Dexter McLendon, is to destroy the breeding grounds of mosquitoes before they get a chance to reproduce. He even invited in a professional to help him draft the ordinance years ago.

“Instead of going around spraying all over town, they basically said, ‘Look, you gotta go fight your problem where your problem’s coming from,'” McLendon said.

Mosquitoes breed in areas where there is still or standing water, like a pond or marsh. But they can easily be found in untreated pools, birdbaths and buckets of water left outside homes. The ordinance requires home owners and businesses to clean up areas that could potentially attract the pests. And the city is not backing down.

“To be quite blunt with you, if these people do not clean it up, we’re gonna clean it up for them and send them a bill or we’re gonna fine them,” McLendon said. “Because we don’t want to have mosquitoes. And you’re not going to be able to get rid of all of them, but we’re gonna focus on the areas that we can do something about.”

Greenville Police will be going to area businesses and neighborhoods to check the property. They are looking especially for tires left outside. When filled with water, tires can make a perfect home for mosquito larvae.

Greenville Police Chief Lonzo Ingram is happy to lend his men to help rid the city of the pesky pests.

“They’ll be breeding and be flying, and be biting, and you know with things like the Zika virus it seems like every time you turn around we’ve got another disease coming along, another virus,” he said. “We just certainly want to do everything we can to prevent those kinds of things from happening.”

While city officials hope enforcing this ordinance will cut down on the mosquito problem, they still plan on having workers spray insecticide around the city when the weather is warmer. Ingram and McLendon do not plan on stopping the spraying altogether, just cutting down on the number of spraying days.