When someone calls and asks for directions on how to get to the Golden Apple, Jodi Smith replies, "You pass a row of junk cars by a dilapidated bar."

Mrs. Smith and her husband, Frank, who own the Golden Apple bar and restaurant, said they're fed up with junk cars, unmowed lawns, abandoned houses and falling-in garages in the borough.

"Supposedly there are (building) codes, but how can you tell?" said Smith, of West Middlesex. "Codes are fine if they're enforced."

The Smiths, who also own two rental houses in the borough, said their property at 37 Mercer Ave. is sandwiched between a vacant house that they see cats and groundhogs entering, and a neighbor who keeps an overturned boat, a van, a camper, a walk-in cooler, roofing material and trash in the yard.

"We're in between two of the most deplorable houses," Mrs. Smith said. "I want to paint it, I want to do things to it, but I don't want to do it if I'm not going to get the money back."

"I don't know why anyone would want to move into town," Smith added.

Borough secretary Sharon Stinedurf came to work Monday and found two bags of garbage at the door and an unsigned letter stating that the trash was picked up in the Laird Avenue and Adams Street section of town.

"The borough looks like a ghetto," the letter states. "There are abandoned houses that should be burned down, rental properties that look like trash and several borough-owned properties ... that need attention. We should have a health code inspector to address these issues."

Mayor Thomas Stanton agrees that code enforcement is lacking.

"There's no enforcement as far as I'm concerned," he said.

Stanton said code enforcement officer Edd Buczo is active "when he wants to be."

Buczo does not like to go after deteriorating houses because it requires serving people with citations and fining them, Stanton said.

"That's not a job people like," Stanton said.

Buczo would not say whether he had cited anyone lately.

"We like to try to work with the people and try to do it first before we cite them," Buczo said, adding that he is not paid for code enforcement.

Buczo, who is paid for building inspections, said he has alerted some property owners to violations. "There's a couple I think we're going to have to cite," he said.

"There's a process we have to go through and we're doing it right now," he said of complaints about his job.

Buczo has the backing of Council President David Cusick. Generally, the borough's approach to code enforcement has been to write letters to offenders asking them to clean up, he said.

"We haven't gotten 100 percent results but we're satisfied with it," Cusick said. "We've been to keep it (problem) in hand."

Council receives few citizen complaints about enforcement, he said.

Smith claimed he has approached council in the past and his complaints "have fallen on deaf ears."

Smith, Stanton and Cusick all have high hopes for Wheatland's participation in a circuit-riding code enforcement office that Mercer County Regional Council of Governments has proposed. The office would serve several municipalities.

Cusick said details of the proposal are sketchy, but "we're going to tie in with them."

"I'd be 100 percent in favor of that," Smith said.