Cities embark on cleaning up nuisances

Cities in southeast Iowa have made strides in cleaning up junk properties so that everyone can enjoy living in a beautiful neighborhood.

One way cities have done that is by enforcing their nuisance ordinances. Sometimes it's as simple as reminding a homeowner to mow their overgrown grass. Other times it's much more involved, such as condemning a dilapidated building and demolishing it to make room for new construction.

Fairfield, Washington and Mt. Pleasant employ people specifically to enforce city codes, though they each have their own unique structure. Washington, for instance, employs a code enforcement officer, Dalton Sorrells, and a building official who handles the structure-related nuisances, Steve Donnolly.

Mt. Pleasant also has a code enforcement officer, Jared Walker, who works within the Mt. Pleasant Police Department and handles things like parking regulations and stray dogs in addition to enforcing many other ordinances. Jack Swarm is the city's building and zoning administrator.

Fairfield's code enforcement officer is Scott Vaughan, who is also the city's fire chief. Fairfield does not have a building code to enforce and thus does not have a separate building code administrator. However, Vaughan performs some of those same tasks through the city's rental inspections. Fairfield City Administrator Aaron Kooiker said Fairfield does not inspect new or existing buildings, with the exception of rental properties.

Washington

Washington City Administrator Brent Hinson said Washington has really ramped up its nuisance enforcement since 2012. That year, the city published its comprehensive plan with a list of long-term goals. One of the findings in the report was that Washington had a higher than average number of dilapidated properties, and that the city needed to take more aggressive action in cleaning them up.

The Citizen Housing Improvement Task Force was formed to address that problem. The task force met for a year and came up with a number of recommendations for the city, one of which was to create a code enforcement officer. Hinson said the addition of a code enforcement officer has been a great help to the city, because the building official was so busy with other things such as approving permits that he couldn't devote his full attention to nuisances. The city of Washington also began doing rental inspections about five years ago.

Twice a month, Hinson, Mayor Jaron Rosien, and the city's code enforcement staff meet to review outstanding nuisance complaints. It's an opportunity for city officials to review the applicable laws and how the city wants to enforce them.

'In an average month, we address 30-50 nuisances ranging from junk to tall grass,” Hinson said. 'I think we've seen a lot of improvement in recent years.”

Redevelopment

The most striking improvements in Washington have been to its old and dilapidated buildings.

'We've had some really good redevelopment of a few lousy properties,” Hinson said.

The first one that comes to mind is the former Goncho Apartments at the corner of North Marion Avenue and West Third Street. In 2013, residents of the apartment building were given just a day to evacuate the building after authorities discovered meth contamination and fire code violations. The building sat empty for the rest of its life until it was finally torn down in 2018. A local developer built six townhomes on the site where the building once stood. They were all sold within a few months after construction.

'That was a real redevelopment success,” Hinson said. 'That came from us putting our foot down and saying, ‘This can't continue.'”

The city acquired a downtown building about a block northeast of Central Park at the intersection of Second Street and Second Avenue. It was once occupied by Linda Lou's Diner and Red Bear Day Care. Thanks to a bank foreclosure, the city agreed to purchase it rather than try to enforce nuisance ordinances against the former owner. Hinson said the city believed it was the fastest way for the property to be redeveloped.

The building needed to be torn down, an expensive proposition considering it was 'practically made of asbestos,” Hinson recalled. Since asbestos fibers harm lung tissue when inhaled, asbestos-contaminated building materials must be disposed of in a special way so the asbestos does not escape.

'It was insanely expensive [to demolish], but the redevelopment will easily pay that back,” Hinson said.

Allen Mitchell CPA purchased the lot and is erecting a 12,000-square-foot office building there.

'That kind of stuff doesn't happen overnight,” Hinson said. 'We have taken long-standing nuisance properties out and gotten new buildings in their place.”

Hinson mentioned another abandoned building – the McCleery Calendar Factory – is another that is ripe for redevelopment. He hopes it can be turned into offices or apartments.

'It's amazingly well built, like a battleship,” Hinson said. 'It had printing presses on the second floor. If it were closer to downtown, I think it would have already been redeveloped.”

Mt. Pleasant

Mt. Pleasant Building and Zoning Administrator Jack Swarm said he doesn't focus on enforcing some nuisances over others, though he acknowledges that 'big” nuisances will naturally take priority over 'small” ones.

'If you've got a property loaded with junk, we'll focus on that before we do the minor things,” he said. 'We don't say, ‘Let's focus on tall grass' or ‘Let's focus on tires.'”

Swarm investigates properties based on complaints he receives. Some of those are complaints first given to a member of the city council, who relays it to him. He also generates his own complaints just from driving around town.

'I don't go looking for problems,” Swarm said. 'And I don't enjoy seeing problems. I don't hop in my car to see what I can see. But in the course of performing my building code inspections, I see a lot of different things.”

Swarm said he always takes a different route home from the office than the one he took to the office so he sees more of the town. He added that he doesn't like to 'rattle someone's cage” over a trivial detail when he has more pressing nuisances to deal with.

'If I'm getting really picky with people, but there's a big nuisance down the street I haven't touched, people can smell the unfairness a mile away,” he said. 'I do my very best to be kind and courteous to people. I've discovered that treating people with respect, just as if I was dealing with my own family, seems to be the best way to gain people's trust and to get them to make corrections.”

Mt. Pleasant does not have a rental code or a licensing program. Swarm said cities in Iowa are not required to have one unless they have more than 20,000 residents. Some cities have begun such programs even though they're not required to, cities like Washington and Columbus Junction.

Though Mt. Pleasant doesn't have a licensing program, it does have codes that every occupied dwelling must comply with. For instance, all occupied buildings must have smoke detectors.

'If I happen to be on-site, I will enforce those codes, but we don't have a regular inspection schedule to enforce the occupancy code we have,” Swarm said.

Swarm can issue a 'no occupancy order” to dwellings that are unsafe to inhabit either because they are missing doors and windows, if the utilities are disconnected, or if the furnace cannot heat the building to 65 degrees.

'If one house is not taken care of, it damages the property value of the house next door,” Swarm remarked.

Fairfield

The city of Fairfield is about to embark on a more aggressive nuisance enforcement drive, made possible with the recent hiring of an assistant city attorney. In July, the city council welcomed Wendi Dixon, who is working alongside Fairfield City Attorney John Morrissey. Dixon plans to dedicate 10 hours per month to city business in addition to her other work with Morrissey.

The city increased its retainer paid to the city attorney from $3,300 per month to $4,900 per month, with the understanding that the city attorney would have more work to do pursuing nuisance violations and filing legal paperwork such as property easements in a more timely manner.

Fairfield City Administrator Aaron Kooiker remarked that the city doesn't have a building code, but its rental inspection is a sort of 'building code light,” meaning it's a way to force at least landlords to update their buildings to comply with habitability standards.

'Fairfield doesn't have a building code at all,” Kooiker said. 'We rely on builders to build a safe building. We can't enforce anything other than to approve or disapprove a building permit.”

Kooiker said the city of Fairfield has not gotten involved, at least not recently, in purchasing abandoned buildings in order to tear them down. He said there are a number of private developers who have purchased run-down properties and spruced them up. One of those is Don Hoelting. Hoelting purchased a home in 2017 that had suffered a devastating fire just months before. Keeping only the exterior frame of the house and its roof, Hoelting had everything else in the home rebuilt. By the end of the year, the home had a tenant.