ATLANTA – When Tabetha DuPriest walked up to post a notice on the door of a rundown mobile home in south Georgia, a wave of nausea overcame her.

 “There was a freezer on the porch with old meat and huge maggots in it,” the Worth County tax commissioner wrote in a note on a photo of the home, which was barely visible due to overgrown brush. “Not sure what else was dead inside.”

 The photo was part of a slideshow DuPriest brought to the state Capitol to help build the case for a measure that would change how the state handles abandoned mobile homes in Georgia.   

“That’s just a couple,” DuPriest told lawmakers “I have many more examples.”

 The proposal, sponsored by Rep. John Corbett, R-Lake Park, easily cleared the House on Thursday after addressing earlier concerns that unscrupulous landowners might try to sell mobile homes they falsely claimed were derelict.

 Right now, a landowner can hope someone bids on the mobile home if it goes to a county tax sale. Corbett cited an example from back in his district, where an abandoned mobile home has been sitting for seven years.

 Or, the landowner can pay to move the mobile home to a storage facility, where he may have to pay indefinitely to store it.

Neither option has proven workable, Corbett said.

“It ends up sitting there and just becoming an eyesore, blight – a drug haven, basically,” Corbett said.

Under the proposal, landowners can ask the county to inspect an abandoned mobile home on their property. The property owner can either haul it off to the landfill or go through the process of selling it. A mobile home owner can recoup his loss if the landowner abuses the process.