Multifamily communities, HOAs, retail properties and public facilities in Stone Mountain and DeKalb County
Gutter cleaning is sold as a commercial and institutional service. The accounts that fit are apartment and condominium communities, homeowner association boards and the management firms holding their contracts, retail centers and office buildings, houses of worship and schools, and public facilities. Those accounts work because the scope repeats: the same buildings, the same roof lines, the same discharge path, on a cycle the property already carries in an operating budget.
Single family gutter cleaning is not sold by Rare Earth Ltd at any price and is not available as a favor. Pressure washing is the only exterior trade Rare Earth Ltd offers a homeowner. A Stone Mountain resident looking for gutter work on a house needs a residential specialist, and reading that here beats hearing it after a voicemail.
For a public agency buyer or a corporate supplier diversity program, the legal entity is Rare Earth Ltd, trading as Thrare Contracting. Rare Earth Ltd carries DBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, and appears in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. HUBZone, 8(a) and SOC 2 status are not held, and nothing on this page should be read as claiming them.
That question decides which rules a gutter scope has to satisfy, and it gets answered first. The incorporated City of Stone Mountain covered 1.65 square miles of land at the 2020 Census, held 6,703 residents on Census day 2020 and an estimated 6,562 as of July 1, 2025, and counted 2,401 households in the 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey (U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts, Stone Mountain city, Georgia, read 2026-09-02). Mail addressed to Stone Mountain reaches a much larger slice of DeKalb County than those 1.65 square miles.
The City writes its own environmental law and states its own reach in the text. Section 28-581(b) of the City Code, inside the article on illicit discharge and illegal connections, provides that the article "shall apply throughout the corporate area of the city" (City of Stone Mountain, Code of Ordinances, Supplement 47, codified through Ordinance No. 2025-03 enacted June 3, 2025, read on Municode 2026-09-02). A building outside the corporate limits is not reached by that article no matter what the envelope says, and a bid written against the wrong jurisdiction protects nobody. The City's Department of Planning and Zoning, reachable at 470-895-5608, settles the question in one call (City of Stone Mountain, Planning and Zoning, read 2026-09-02).
Two names also get conflated. Stone Mountain Park is a state owned attraction adjacent to the city and is a separate entity from the City of Stone Mountain, with a separate governing regime. A manager holding sites near both should not assume one rule set covers them.
The rental base inside the city limits is real for a small municipality. The owner occupied housing unit rate for Stone Mountain city was 49.8 percent across the 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey, with median gross rent at $1,540, which puts roughly half of occupied units in the hands of a landlord or a board rather than an owner occupant (U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts, read 2026-09-02).
Stone Mountain has operated a stormwater utility since Ordinance No. 04-17 was adopted on December 7, 2004, with service charges accruing from January 1, 2005 under Section 28-506 (City of Stone Mountain, Code of Ordinances, Chapter 28, read on Municode 2026-09-02). The billing unit is the equivalent residential unit, and Section 28-502 fixes its size: 3,000 square feet of impervious area equals one equivalent residential unit.
Section 28-507(2) applies that unit to every parcel that is not a detached house. Developed land outside the detached dwelling class is billed one equivalent residential unit for each 3,000 square feet of impervious surface on the property, rounded to the next highest tenth of a unit. Section 28-502 names rooftops as impervious surface in the same breath as parking lots, walkways, patios, storage areas and compacted gravel. Multiple dwelling unit properties are handled separately under Section 28-507(4), at one unit per dwelling times an adjustment factor the City set at 0.5. Section 28-502 also sets the floor for the whole scheme: land carrying more than 200 square feet of impervious surface counts as developed.
The useful part of that arithmetic is not the size of the bill. The City has already inventoried the roof and the pavement and charges the property on the premise that water leaving both surfaces travels a designed path. A blocked trough removes nothing from the inventory. Blockage only relocates the discharge to ground that was never measured for it, most often against a foundation.
The City Code answers without ambiguity. Section 28-503 gives the City ownership or access for drainage inside public streets, rights of way, easements and public land, then provides that operation and maintenance of stormwater systems on private property, absent a public dedication, "shall be and remain the legal responsibility of the property owner, or its occupant."
Section 28-504 converts that allocation into an affirmative duty. Owners and developers of developed real property in the city "shall provide, manage, maintain, and operate on-site stormwater systems sufficient to collect, convey, detain, and discharge stormwater in a safe manner." The same section declares that any failure to meet the obligation "shall constitute a nuisance" subject to an abatement action in the municipal court. Where the court finds a nuisance the owner does not abate in time, the City is authorized to enter the property, perform the necessary work, and assess the actual cost against the owner in the same manner as a tax levied against the property, with lien rights perfected on the superior court general execution docket. Section 28-504 also grants City officers the right to enter private property on reasonable notice to inspect and to run engineering tests.
A gutter and downspout system is the first hundred feet of an on site stormwater system. That is the practical reading of Section 28-504 for a Stone Mountain apartment community or retail center, and it is the reason a dated per building condition report is worth more to an owner than a paid invoice. The invoice proves a payment. The report proves the duty was discharged, on a named date, building by building.
Not into a street drain. Article V of Chapter 28, adopted by Ordinance No. 05-06 on April 5, 2005, prohibits any person from discharging into the municipal separate storm sewer system "any pollutants or waters containing any pollutants, other than stormwater," and Section 28-583(a) extends that prohibition to any person who allows others under its control to do the discharging. A property that hires the crew is inside that sentence beside the crew.
Section 28-582 supplies the definitions that decide the question. A non stormwater discharge is any discharge to the storm drain system "not composed entirely of stormwater." The pollutant list names detergents, "biodegradable or otherwise," along with yard wastes, floatables, cleaning chemicals and non hazardous solid wastes. Water rinsed off a gutter face carries leaf litter and whatever cleaner was applied, which lands it on that list twice.
The exemptions under Section 28-583(a) are short, and none of them describes a contractor washing a building. They cover water line flushing by a government agency, other potable water sources, landscape irrigation and lawn watering, diverted stream flows, rising groundwater and groundwater infiltration, uncontaminated pumped groundwater, foundation and footing drains other than active dewatering systems, crawl space pumps, air conditioning condensation, springs, natural riparian habitat and wetland flows, firefighting discharges, and non stormwater discharges already authorized by an NPDES permit in full compliance.
So the compliance path is containment rather than paperwork. Debris leaves the trough into a container, rinse water is released across a vegetated area on the property where soil does the filtering, and the drop zone gets cleared before the crew moves to the next building. The City's public works director administers the article under Section 28-581(e), and Section 28-585 permits the City to enter and inspect properties and facilities "at reasonable times as often as may be necessary" to determine compliance. Section 28-587(f) allows a civil penalty of up to $1,000 for each day a violation stands uncorrected after a notice of violation, and Section 28-587(e) turns the City's abatement costs into a special assessment and a lien against the property.
Background: how the federal Clean Water Act and Georgia EPD sit above a city ordinance like this one.
Two further articles of Chapter 28, adopted the same day as the illicit discharge rules, govern what happens once the material is on the ground. Section 28-563 makes it unlawful to dump, deposit, throw or leave litter on any public or private property in the city unless the material goes into a receptacle on that property or the owner or tenant in lawful possession has consented. Wet leaf mass staged against a building without the manager's agreement sits inside that sentence.
Section 28-564 governs the haul off. No person may operate a motor vehicle with a load "unless the load on or in such vehicle is adequately secured to prevent the dropping or shifting of materials from such load onto the roadway." Neither provision is exotic. Both decide whether a resident complaint about a vendor reaches a property manager as a phone call or as a citation.
The answer turns on whether the work is maintenance or alteration, and the City has published the line in writing rather than leaving it to a phone call.
The City of Stone Mountain Historic Preservation Commission was created by the Mayor and City Council in 1996. It seats seven members on three year terms and runs a design review process for property inside the local historic district. The Commission meets on the third Wednesday of each month at 6:30 p.m. at Stone Mountain City Hall, 875 Main Street, and a Certificate of Appropriateness application has to be filed fourteen days before a meeting to reach that agenda (City of Stone Mountain, Historic Preservation Commission, read 2026-09-02). A commercial owner planning exterior work inside the district is on a monthly review calendar, which is a scheduling fact, not a formality.
Chapter 6 of the City's Design Guidelines governs commercial, institutional and industrial rehabilitation. It states that any property owner or occupant wishing to make an exterior alteration to any building, structure or site within the Stone Mountain Historic District must apply to the Historic Preservation Commission for a Certificate of Appropriateness, and that the Commission reviews each property as a unique case (City of Stone Mountain, Design Guidelines, Chapter 6, read 2026-09-02).
Section 6.7 of Chapter 6 covers roofs, and two of its guidelines address drainage by name. Guideline 6.7.6 provides that "Historic gutters and downspouts should be retained," and that where they have deteriorated and need replacing, the new gutters and downspouts "should be similar to the original in material and appearance." Guideline 6.7.7 covers buildings that never had a system: they should add one "in such a manner as to be unobtrusive," and new and innovative gutter systems are encouraged.
Chapter 6 also explains why the Commission cares. Guideline 6.2.2 instructs owners to inspect exterior materials regularly to identify and treat causes of deterioration, listing "leaking gutters, roofs or flashing" first. Guideline 6.2.3 instructs them to maintain those materials "by providing proper drainage so that water does not stand on flat, horizontal surfaces or accumulate in curved decorative features," because excessive moisture drives mortar joint deterioration, metal corrosion and wood decay. The chapter illustrates the point with a photograph of a masonry wall captioned as water damage that "is the result of a gutter system that is not maintained." In a district whose governing preference is repair over replacement, a drainage system that works is the least expensive preservation tool a commercial owner controls.
One further guideline reaches the pressure washing side of the same building. Guideline 6.2.4 states that exterior surfaces should be cleaned "with the gentlest method possible, such as low pressure water and detergents, using natural brushes," and that sandblasting, high pressure waterblasting and caustic chemical treatments "are never appropriate cleaning methods and will permanently damage exterior surfaces." A Stone Mountain historic commercial property buying gutter cleaning and facade washing on one mobilization needs a vendor who reads that sentence before choosing a tip.
Chapter 8 of the same Design Guidelines draws the line explicitly. Routine maintenance and in kind replacement activities do not require a Certificate of Appropriateness, because ordinary repairs "do not involve a change in design, material, or outer appearance and do not alter a building's historic character." The chapter's own list of routine maintenance examples includes "repair of a gutter or downspout system with the same type of system as the existing," alongside painting of previously painted surfaces and replacement of broken window glass (City of Stone Mountain, Design Guidelines, Chapter 8, read 2026-09-02).
That places a cleaning visit on the maintenance side and a change of gutter profile, material or color on the review side. Chapter 8 attaches two cautions worth handing to an owner. Work that needs no Certificate of Appropriateness can still need a building permit, and certain building material replacement activities require at minimum a staff issued Certificate accompanied by photographic documentation of existing conditions. Chapter 8 also names the risk running the other direction: prolonged lack of significant maintenance is treated as demolition by neglect, which the City addresses through the minimum maintenance standards in its Historic Preservation Ordinance, and failure to meet those standards can constitute a violation and bring citations.
The instruction to a vendor is short. Photograph the condition before and after, keep the system the same unless the owner holds a Certificate saying otherwise, and route anything that would change design, material or appearance onto the punch list instead of into the truck.
The limb overhanging a trough is regulated as well. The City's Department of Planning and Zoning directs an owner inside the historic district to file a Certificate of Appropriateness application for tree removal, and an owner outside the district to file a tree removal permit application. Where a tree is dangerous or leaning and has to come down at once to prevent injury or damage, the City allows the removal without a prior permit but still requires the application within 24 hours, supported by photographs or video of the condition (City of Stone Mountain, Planning and Zoning, read 2026-09-02).
For a maintenance program that has one consequence. On a regulated site the canopy above the roof is a fixed input rather than a lever a property pulls on short notice, so the cleaning interval absorbs the load instead of the chainsaw doing it. That is a budgeting fact for an owner and a frequency argument for a manager defending a three visit cycle to a board.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts the 1991 to 2020 twelve monthly precipitation normals summing to 50.43 inches for station USW00013874, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, against a separately published annual normal of 49.71 inches (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Monthly Climate Normals 1991-2020, read 2026-08-31). That normal is the design volume every roof drainage system in DeKalb County works against.
One inch of rain across one square foot of roof is 0.623 gallons. Applied to the normal, a single 2,500 square foot building footprint sheds about 78,500 gallons in an average year. A small apartment community with 40,000 square feet of total roof area is moving on the order of 1.26 million gallons annually, every gallon of it expected to reach a downspout and leave by a path somebody drew.
The annual figure understates the exposure, because rainfall in this part of Georgia does not arrive in equal installments. A single summer cell delivers a large share of a month's total in well under an hour. A trough half loaded with litter passes an ordinary week without complaint and fails inside that hour, which is when water finds the fascia, the wall and the slab. Cleaning intervals are set against the worst hour on the calendar rather than against the annual total, and the City's own stormwater math in Section 28-507 assumes the designed path is open when that hour arrives.
Read the full treatment: OSHA fall protection, the ladder exclusion, and the questions to put to a gutter bidder.
The point a Stone Mountain manager should carry away from it is that access method belongs in the bid comparison next to price. Two story walk up buildings and one story retail strips are reached differently, and the difference changes both the crew size and the exposure the property is buying.
The sequence is built so that no more than one building is affected at a time, which keeps a community's parking count and a retail center's frontage usable through the visit.
Five inputs drive the figure: linear footage of gutter, story count, access method, debris load and visit frequency. A quote from Thrare Contracting names all five so a manager can check the arithmetic against a competing bid line by line instead of comparing two lump sums.
Several trades sit outside the cleaning number and get quoted on their own. Gutter and downspout repair, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof repair, excavation of a buried drain line, and tree work all fall outside it. In the historic district, replacement of a gutter or downspout with a different system is not a scope change a vendor can absorb, because Chapter 6 of the Design Guidelines routes that decision through the Historic Preservation Commission.
Detail: the full boundary between cleaning and the trades quoted separately.
Reference: the line item scope of a commercial gutter cleaning.
Elsewhere in the metro: the other cities covered from the same dispatch.
Thrare Contracting does not clean gutters for single family homeowners in Stone Mountain or anywhere else. Pressure washing is the only exterior service Rare Earth Ltd sells to a homeowner. Gutter cleaning goes to multifamily communities, homeowner associations and their management companies, commercial property, and government and institutional facilities.
Cleaning is routine maintenance and does not require a Certificate of Appropriateness. Chapter 8 of the City of Stone Mountain Design Guidelines lists repair of a gutter or downspout system with the same type of system as the existing among its routine maintenance examples, because such work does not change design, material or outer appearance. Replacing a system with a different profile or material is an exterior alteration and goes to the Historic Preservation Commission, which meets the third Wednesday of each month with applications due fourteen days ahead.
No. Section 28-583(a) of the City of Stone Mountain Code prohibits discharging into the municipal separate storm sewer system any pollutants or waters containing any pollutants other than stormwater, and Section 28-582 lists detergents, yard wastes and cleaning chemicals as pollutants. The rinse water stays on the property and is released across a vegetated area where soil filters it.
The property owner. Section 28-503 of the City of Stone Mountain Code provides that stormwater systems on private property with no public dedication remain the legal responsibility of the owner or its occupant, and Section 28-504 requires owners of developed property in the city to maintain on site stormwater systems sufficient to collect, convey, detain and discharge stormwater safely. A failure is declared a nuisance and can be abated by the City at the owner's cost.
Each visit closes with a per building condition report carrying the date, the buildings worked, downspout and buried connection flow test results, before and after photographs, and a separate punch list of conditions found outside the cleaning scope. That record is what demonstrates the Section 28-504 maintenance duty was met on a named date, building by building.
A commercial gutter cleaning quote is priced on five inputs: linear footage of gutter, number of stories, access method, debris load and visit frequency. Gutter repair, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof repair, buried drain line excavation and tree work sit outside the cleaning price and are quoted separately.
Rare Earth Ltd, doing business as Thrare Contracting, holds DBE and MBE certification, qualifies as a small disadvantaged business, and is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. Rare Earth Ltd does not hold HUBZone, 8(a) or SOC 2 status and does not represent otherwise.
Also cited on the hub: the federal and Georgia stormwater authorities behind these city rules.
Send the building count and the approximate linear footage of gutter, or the site plan. Serving Stone Mountain and DeKalb County.