One man who attended the Gulf Shores City Council work session Monday said almost six years was enough time for property owners to have their storm debris from hurricanes Ivan and Katrina cleaned up. He said there are still many property owners whose properties still bear the scars of the storms.

“If you go down the beach right now, one of the properties just to the east of Hwy. 59 on East Beach Boulevard. — the old Waves property — there are bent signs, a torn up parking lot and torn up real estate signs,” he said. “It’s absolutely ridiculous how we’ve let that go on like this going on five or six years now.”

He said Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon took the initiative two years ago and forced property owners whose properties had not been cleaned up since the storms to do so. According to Hughes, if owners did not clean up their property within a certain amount of time, city workers cleaned the property and then billed the owner for the work performed.

“Most of these property owners don’t live here anyway,” he said. “They don’t care.”

Hughes said it’s not only private properties in the city that look the worse for wear.

“I roughly estimate that over 30 percent of the signage in Gulf Shores is still either twisted or bent from past hurricanes — and has been so for many years,” he wrote in an e-mail to Council members. “Is this the image we want to present to our visitors from around the country and our residents alike?”

Hughes provided numerous photos showing city and state signs from all over the city in differing states of disrepair.

He said the image of the city will suffer if these properties and signs remain in their present state.

“We talk about tourism and Supper on the Sand telling people to come on back,” he said. “But to have all this debris and to allow all this to go on, I just do not understand.”

He suggested the city do the same thing Orange Beach did.

“We need to send a letter out telling these owners that you either need to clean this up or the city’s going to do it and we’re going to charge you,” he said.

Hughes said area leaders have done a good job telling people the city is back and open for business, but something needs to be done about the debris.

“We’re getting ready to have 35,000 or 40,000 people down here (for the Hangout Music Festival),” he said. “And the property I’m talking about is right across the street (from the festival grounds).

“I hear what you’re saying,” Mayor Robert Craft said. “We’ll take a look at it and take it to heart. If you have debris on the ground, we can make that be cleaned up.

“At the beach and (Alabama) 59 there should be none of this debris,” he said. “But it’s right here in the heart of our city and everybody sees this. I hope somebody here gets on board with this and does something about it.”