Bixby Resident Faces Setbacks From City While Starting Community Garden

A few people in Bixby who want to start a community garden on city property say they're running into some road blocks.

Amanda Rayon has lived on the street for her entire life and wanted to turn an abandoned piece of city property into a garden to feed herself and her neighbors.

Rayon says the City of Bixby owns the land across the street from her house and it has been vacant for decades.

"If we feel like we can do better than what's been done with this piece of land, then why shouldn't we be able to?” said Rayon.

She says so far, she's run into some problems with the City.

The City of Bixby has told her she can't continue to work on the land without the right permits.

The City says that to start a community garden, there needs to be a formal proposal, a formal organization and city council approval.

City officials say they haven't received that yet from Amanda.

However, Rayon says she did that and the City told her that the proposal wasn't enough.

"We were told to move forward with getting our LLC, which we did, and to come up with a more detailed plan, which we did, and I sent that to them, but now that's not enough, we need to get the non-profit, which is quite a bit more money," said Rayon.

In the Bixby 2030 Plan, the City says it would support using vacant or underused properties as community gardens.

Rayon says she doesn't feel like that's the case.

"I don't feel very supported, I know that,” said Rayon. “I've had people driving by here, yelling at me, 'lady, who do you think you are? You've got a lot of nerve."

She says she understands getting the garden approved is a process but doesn't think it should be this hard or cost this much money.

"I understand that it's not just so easy for the city to give us permission to use the lot because of liability issues, I understand that, I get that,” said Rayon. They're limited in what they're able to do, but I do think that we need to open up a dialogue."