LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Thanks to the tornado that happened in March, Michelle Bedard hasn't lived in her Little Rock home in Walnut Valley in over six months. Twenty years of memories were wiped clean and then torn down a few months later.
"I'm not rebuilding, I've moved into another residence," Bedard explained.
Since then, it's been one thing after another for her. It cost nearly $10,000 to demolish her home, with thousands more dollars going to cleaning that up.
Then came a letter from Little Rock.
"It's like, how much more money do I have to spend to close this chapter?" she asked.
A letter from the City of Little Rock gave notice to clean up her property. Bedard obliged, and paid someone to do that, but is still frustrated that it had to be done.
According to Walnut Valley Homeowner's Association President John Payne, it's not the first time that has happened.
"We started hearing from homeowners in the last few weeks about this, and it's kind of a good thing, bad thing," Payne said.
He says he gets it— things need to be cleaned up. Though, looking around at the neighborhood, there is still work to be done.
"People need time to just kind of get on the schedule and work things out, and that's just a matter of we need a little bit of prodding and pushing to make sure that we are continuing to maintain," Payne said. "At the same time, some people do need to be pushed to do something."
When we spoke to the city, Jamie Collins, Director of the Department of Planning and Development, said an anonymous complaint about other homes in the area prompted them to look into the debris.
While they did issue those notices, Collins explained how they're not as serious as they may first appear.
"It's a notice, it's not a citation," he said. "We're just letting people know that they need to be picking up this area."
Collins said they do want to help, and this is the first step.
"Either try to bring in more contractors in the area, advertise, kind of help out with that the best that we can because we can't contract with them, but at least we can talk to them," Collins added.
Bedard said all of this is just another reminder of what happened.
"It's still here," she said. "It's still something that I've got to deal with on a day-to-day basis."
Collins said if you have any questions about the notices, you should call them.