Apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations, office and retail owners and public facilities inside the Decatur city limits and across DeKalb County. Rare Earth Ltd operates out of Atlanta and works Decatur as a service area.
Thrare Contracting sells gutter cleaning to organizations, not to households. In Decatur that means apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and the third party managers who run them, office parks and retail centers, schools and houses of worship, and city, county and state facilities. A portfolio buyer is the right fit for three reasons: one mobilization serves many roofs, the work recurs against a budget line the property already carries, and the person who signs wants a document at the end rather than a handshake.
Single family gutter cleaning is not on the menu. Pressure washing is the one exterior service Rare Earth Ltd sells to homeowners, so an owner of a Decatur bungalow who needs a trough cleared should call a residential specialist. Putting that in the first hundred words of this page is cheaper for both sides than putting it on the phone.
Rare Earth Ltd trades as Thrare Contracting. The company carries DBE, ACDBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, runs E-Verify, and appears in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. It does not hold HUBZone status, 8(a) status or a SOC 2 attestation, and no proposal from this company will claim it does. Every item on the held list can be checked by a Decatur procurement officer without calling us first.
Decatur is an incorporated city inside DeKalb County and it runs its own municipal separate storm sewer system. The Georgia Environmental Protection Division reissued the City's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit for that MS4 on June 11, 2019, and the City's Stormwater Utility, established in 1999, is the body responsible for enforcing environmental regulations and for the City's Clean Water Act compliance (City of Decatur, Stormwater Information, read 2026-09-02).
That fact decides which ordinance a vendor scope has to satisfy. Section 9.6 of Decatur's Unified Development Ordinance, titled Illicit Discharge and Illegal Connection, states its own reach at subsection 9.6.3.B: "The provisions of this Section shall apply throughout the corporate limits of the City, Georgia." A property at a Decatur city address answers to that section, not to a DeKalb County document (City of Decatur Code of Ordinances, Part IV, Article 9, read on Municode 2026-09-02).
Subsection 9.6.4.A carries the prohibition itself: "No person shall throw, drain, or otherwise discharge, cause, or allow others under its control to throw, drain, or otherwise discharge into the municipal separate storm sewer system any pollutants or waters containing any pollutants, other than stormwater." The exemption list underneath it is short, and reading it closely is worth a manager's five minutes. It covers landscape irrigation, air conditioning condensate, firefighting flows, and washing of an individual vehicle or pet by its owner on the owner's own property using biodegradable soap only. Nothing on that list exempts a contractor rinsing a building. A Decatur community therefore has no ordinance cover for letting gutter rinse water reach a catch basin, and the words "allow others under its control" put the property itself inside the sentence alongside its vendor.
Two further duties in Section 9.6 land on the property owner rather than on the contractor, and most managers have never been shown them. Subsection 9.6.7.B requires the person responsible for a facility to notify the City Manager in person, by phone or by facsimile no later than 24 hours after a known or suspected release, and to confirm that notice in writing within three business days. Where the discharge comes from a commercial or industrial establishment, the same subsection requires an on site written record of the discharge and of the steps taken to prevent recurrence, retained for at least three years. Subsection 9.6.8.D provides that abatement costs the City incurs become a special assessment and a lien against the property.
The field instruction does not change at the city line: bag the debris, contain the rinse water, keep both out of the drain. What changes is who enforces it, what a failure attaches to, and whose phone rings.
Background: the federal and state stormwater rules and why the governing ordinance changes at a city line.
Decatur regulates its tree canopy harder than its neighbors do, and that regulation is the best single predictor of how much material a Decatur roof collects. Section 9.1 of the Unified Development Ordinance, Tree Canopy Conservation, was adopted by Ordinance O-22-Z-01 on January 18, 2022 and took effect on March 21, 2022 (City of Decatur, Tree Canopy Conservation Ordinance, read 2026-09-02). Subsection 9.1.1.B states the target without hedging: "The City's tree canopy goal is a minimum of 65% canopy coverage over the entire City of Decatur."
The requirement reaches commercial and multifamily land head on. Subsection 9.1.5.C requires a minimum of 45 percent tree canopy cover from trees rated fair or better on public and private property in the RS-17, RM-18, RM-22, RM-43, PO, C-1, C-2, C-3, MU, NMU and I zoning districts, which is where nearly every Decatur apartment community, office building and institution sits. For RM and PO parcels, a project that needs a land disturbance permit must additionally conserve at least 50 percent of the existing canopy from fair or better rated trees.
One measurement rule decides what lands in a trough. Subsection 9.1.4.C measures canopy cover as the percent of lot area covered by canopy, "including canopy that projects over buildings and impervious surfaces." A Decatur owner is credited, in other words, for exactly the canopy that overhangs the roof, which is exactly the canopy that drops into the gutter. The ordinance and the maintenance budget are pulling on the same tree.
That canopy is also not going anywhere. Subsection 9.1.5.A requires protected canopy existing on March 21, 2022 to be conserved to the greatest extent possible, with no removal or disturbance of a protected tree without written permission from the City Arborist in the form of an approved Tree Conservation Plan or a Tree Removal Permit. Subsection 9.1.5.B requires required canopy lost over time to be replaced during the first planting season after the loss, a window the ordinance fixes as November 15 to March 1. Removal permits go through the City's online permitting system and can take up to 10 business days to process, and a pre-application meeting with the City Arborist is required before any site development, building, plumbing, pool or utility permit that would remove trees or disturb a protected tree's critical root zone. A Decatur property cannot cut its way out of a debris problem. It has to clean its way out.
The measured canopy numbers back the point up. The City's Urban Tree Canopy Assessment and Change Analysis, completed in March 2021 by Tony Giarusso of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Mike Edelson of Interdev, put citywide canopy cover at 57.1 percent in 2009, 58.9 percent in 2013, 57.2 percent in 2017 and 56.9 percent in 2019, and described it as stable at roughly 57 percent (City of Decatur, Tree Canopy Conservation Ordinance presentation, November 15, 2021, read 2026-09-02). In the 2009 land cover breakdown by future land use published in that same assessment, low density residential land carried 73 percent tree canopy while commercial and high density residential land carried 23 percent, and rights of way carried 40 percent.
Put those two figures side by side and a Decatur scheduling rule falls out of them. A Decatur apartment or office site usually does not sit under its own forest. It sits beside one. The heaviest load on a Decatur commercial roof arrives from mature canopy on adjoining low density lots and from the street right of way, not from the handful of trees inside the parking field. Prevailing wind and the neighbor's species list drive the load, which is why two buildings on one Decatur property can honestly need different visit intervals, and why the condition report rather than the contract is what proves which.
Gutter work makes noise, and Decatur regulates noise on its own terms. The City Commission adopted an updated noise ordinance on March 3, 2025 with an effective date of July 1, 2025. It sets a citywide limit of 65 dB(A) between 7:00 a.m. and 9:59 p.m. and 60 dB(A) between 10:00 p.m. and 6:59 a.m., and it names landscape maintenance equipment, including leaf blowers, lawnmowers, weed trimmers and chainsaws, among the objects it restricts (City of Decatur, Noise Ordinance, read 2026-09-02).
The hour limits on that equipment are tighter than the general decibel limits. Landscape maintenance equipment may not be used between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, or between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. on weekends. A Saturday gutter visit in Decatur therefore has an eight hour blower window running 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. rather than a full working day, which is a real constraint when the point of a weekend visit is to stay out of a retail tenant's business hours. The decibel ceiling applies inside the permitted hours as well; the hours and the limit are two separate requirements, not one.
Decatur goes further than most Georgia cities and publishes a list of specific leaf blower models it treats as noise ordinance ready, last updated July 1, 2025. Every model on that list is rated at or below 65 dB(A). The ratings run from 55 dB for the RYOBI RY404013BTLVNM up to 65 dB for several handheld units, with STIHL BGA series, Makita, ECHO, Toro, Homelite and DeWalt models named alongside them, and the list is overwhelmingly battery powered equipment (City of Decatur, Noise Ordinance Compliant Leaf Blower models as of July 1, 2025, read 2026-09-02). A Decatur property that has already fielded a resident complaint about landscaping noise can hand that list to any exterior vendor and get a straight answer.
The exemptions in the ordinance do not rescue a private property's contractor. They cover city equipment and firms working under contract for the City, work on bridges, streets and highways for the City, DeKalb County or the state, permitted events and parades, recognized schools, and emergency vehicles. A crew working a private Decatur apartment community falls outside every one of those, so the visit gets built around the ordinance instead of around a request for relief from it.
Decatur bills commercial and multifamily property by impervious area, which turns a roof into a line item twice over. Following a Stormwater Master Plan adopted in December 2020, the City Commission approved a fee structure on March 1, 2021 that charges commercial and non single family property 1.0 Equivalent Residential Unit for every 4,000 square feet of impervious area at $215 per ERU, with that category expressly defined to include multiple family dwellings, institutions, public facilities, and private drives and streets. The rate it replaced, adopted in 2016, was $100 per ERU. The Master Plan identified $38 million in high priority capital projects needed by 2040 (City of Decatur, Stormwater Fee Structure, read 2026-09-02).
The same City page notes that credits are available against part of the fee for reducing runoff and for saving tree canopy, which puts the tree ordinance and the stormwater ordinance on the same side of the ledger rather than in tension. A Decatur stormwater bill is a measurement of the roof and pavement area a drainage system has to carry, and a blocked downspout does not lower it. It only moves the water somewhere the property did not design for.
The design condition is the same across the metro. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts the twelve 1991 to 2020 monthly precipitation normals for Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport at a summed 50.43 inches, against the separately published annual normal of 49.71 inches for the same station (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Monthly Climate Normals 1991-2020, station USW00013874, read 2026-08-31). Rain converts at 0.623 gallons per square foot per inch. Run that against a mid sized Decatur office building with a 20,000 square foot footprint and the answer is roughly 628,000 gallons in a normal year, every gallon of it routed through gutters and downspouts whose annual maintenance is a rounding error beside the roof membrane underneath.
Sizing rather than volume is where the failure happens. Georgia's adopted plumbing code is the International Plumbing Code, 2024 edition, with Georgia amendments, which the Department of Community Affairs Board adopted as a mandatory state minimum code with an effective date of January 1, 2026 (Georgia Department of Community Affairs, New Codes January 2026, read 2026-09-02). A trough sized under that code is sized as an open cross section. Packed pecan husks, oak leaf litter and shingle granules occupy part of that cross section, and the storm the trough was sized against does not shrink to match.
Detail: how a gutter is sized and what debris does to that number.
The scope follows the water from roof edge to the point where it leaves the property, which is a longer path than the trough a manager can see from the parking lot.
Full detail: what a commercial gutter cleaning covers.
Full detail: how a job runs on an occupied property.
Five inputs set it: linear feet of gutter, the number of stories, how each roof plane gets reached, the debris load found on the walk, and how many visits a year the property buys. A Decatur quote names all five, because a manager comparing two bids needs to see which input the other contractor left out of the arithmetic.
Full detail: what is in the price and what is not.
Decatur's mix is hardwood led, and the drop is not a single event. Willow oak, water oak and red maple dominate the older neighborhoods ringing the commercial districts, and they shed on four separate schedules: catkins in spring, maple samaras behind them, acorns in September, and the hardwood leaf drop running three to four weeks in November. Pecan and sycamore are the two species that change a schedule outright. Pecan husks and sycamore seed balls are heavy, they hold water, and a single hard drop can close several downspout inlets in one night in a way ordinary leaf litter never does. A Decatur property with mature pecan or sycamore inside or beside its boundary gets a late October visit so the drop is off the roof before the fall rain arrives.
Older Decatur buildings stack a fastener problem on top of the debris problem. Where a gutter hangs on spikes driven through the face into the fascia, wet debris loads the run, the spike works back out of the wood, and the gutter tips away from the building. Water then runs down the wall behind the gutter, where nobody sees it until paint fails or the soffit softens. Crews photograph loose spikes and pulled hangers during the walk and put them on the punch list, because rehanging a run is repair work and gets quoted apart from cleaning.
The governing citations: the OSHA fall protection rules.
The exclusion is the part a Decatur buyer should ask about. 29 CFR 1910.28, paragraph (a)(2)(i), says the section does not apply "To portable ladders". On a two story Decatur walk up, most of the real exposure is on a ladder rather than at a roof edge, so a bid comparison that stops at whether the vendor owns harnesses has skipped the question that matters. Ask instead how the vendor plans to reach each roof plane on your specific buildings, and whether that answer changes on the elevations where a ladder cannot be footed.
Coverage map: the rest of the metro service area.
No. Gutter cleaning is sold only to apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and their management companies, commercial and retail owners, and government and institutional facilities. Pressure washing is the only exterior service Rare Earth Ltd offers to a single family homeowner.
The City of Decatur's own. Section 9.6 of Decatur's Unified Development Ordinance says at subsection 9.6.3.B that its provisions "shall apply throughout the corporate limits of the City, Georgia", and Georgia EPD reissued the City's separate MS4 permit on June 11, 2019. A DeKalb County stormwater document is the wrong citation for a Decatur city address.
Only between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Decatur's noise ordinance, effective July 1, 2025, bars landscape maintenance equipment including leaf blowers between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. on weekends and between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, and holds a 65 dB(A) ceiling during the permitted daytime hours.
Generally no. Section 9.1 of the Unified Development Ordinance requires a minimum of 45 percent canopy cover on commercial, high density residential and institutional parcels, and no protected tree may be removed or disturbed without written permission from the City Arborist through an approved Tree Conservation Plan or Tree Removal Permit. Debris load in Decatur is managed on a cleaning schedule, not with a chainsaw.
Two visits a year is the starting cycle, timed to the November hardwood drop and to spring seed and pollen. Sites with mature pecan or sycamore on or beside the boundary, or with buildings tight to a wooded edge, run three or four. Decatur's own canopy assessment found commercial and high density residential land carries far less canopy than the low density land next to it, so the load usually comes from the neighbor and varies building by building.
A per building condition report with before and after photographs, downspout flow test results for each building, a note of any buried line that failed to clear, and a punch list of findings outside the cleaning scope such as pulled hangers, loose spikes, damaged fascia or a failed buried connection. The report is what moves a property between visit tiers at renewal.
No. Work runs building by building, so the only space out of service at any moment is the drop zone beside the building being cleaned. That zone is coned, worked, cleared, and released before the crew repositions, which leaves the community's parking count intact across the visit.
On five inputs: linear feet of gutter, number of stories, roof access method, debris load, and visits per year. Gutter repair, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof repair, buried drain line excavation and tree work are outside the cleaning price and are quoted separately.
Rare Earth Ltd, doing business as Thrare Contracting, holds DBE, ACDBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, runs E-Verify, and is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. It does not hold HUBZone status, 8(a) status or a SOC 2 attestation and does not represent otherwise.
Federal and state stormwater citations: the stormwater rules section of the hub.
Send the building count and either the linear footage of gutter or a site plan, and note whether the property sits inside the Decatur city limits or in unincorporated DeKalb. Rare Earth Ltd operates out of Atlanta and serves Decatur and DeKalb County.