At Tuesday’s Dayton City Council meeting, the council read and discussed an ordinance to establish civil penalties for Code Enforcement violations.
The goal of the regulation is to crack down on abandoned homes, homes that aren’t being taken care of, and other unsightly matters outside of a property, such as trash buildup, broken windows, and broken gutters.
Dayton’s Code Enforcement Director Cassie Patterson said approximately 50 homes in the city have some major violation or are sitting vacant.
“One block with one property that’s literally sitting there deteriorating, I mean, it just brings the whole lot down,” Patterson said.
The ordinance will allow the city to cite a violation between $50 and $100 every day that the homeowner does not correct the problem. The violation will stop once the homeowner fixes the issue or reaches out to Patterson with evidence that the offense is in the process of being dealt with.
Fines cannot exceed $5,000 per violation.
Generally, Fossett said the city would send out a notice of the violation first. This does not include any fines but makes the homeowner aware that they are in violation of a code. Then they have a certain number of days to fix the issue.
Code enforcement will send out a second notice if they do not respond to the first notice. Should the resident not respond to the second notice, that is when the code enforcement will put on a citation on the property. The homeowner can appeal the citation to the code of enforcement board.
Fossett said the issue in the city mostly comes from absentee property owners and landlords that only visit their property once every six months or so, and the house sits vacant.
“Our experience is that most people that live in the city and own property, we give them a violation notice, and they say ‘OK, I’m working on it,’ or ‘I don’t have the money to do it,'” Fossett said. “This ordinance says if they can show financial hardship, we can waive the daily fines. And they have to prove it to us; we’ll need evidence of that; we can work with them.”
Fossett said the city realizes older people or people in dire financial situations won’t always be able to afford to fix a code violation. He said they are working with the housing authority to create a $100,000 loan fund for low to moderate-income homeowners that might have a code violation. The city will work with the homeowner to find a contractor to help them fix the issue.
“I feel like 90% of the people this isn’t even going to apply to,” Patterson said. “Most people that are going to fix it they’re going to call. Like Jay said, most of them are out-of-state people. Some of them have never even looked at the property.”
Patterson said the goal is to have no properties in the city with boarded-up doors and broken windows. They want to see people living in the houses.
“There’s a concept called the broken window theory that says if you have a property that has a broken window, then people think, well I’ll break the other windows, then the next thing you know two properties down they start breaking out the windows,” Fossett said. “So, our goal is to try to fix those broken windows, whether it’s through the legal process, code enforcement, whatever the case may be. And that creates crime too. You have to address these things, or your city will go down.”
