Washington Co. towns hope to standardize ordinances

The Washington County Sheriff’s office is working with the cities that contract its services in an effort to align municipal laws and make enforcement easier.

“It helps our deputies, if we can get ordinances more uniform across those contract towns, (be) more familiar with the ordinances,” Sheriff Jared Schneider said. “Some of them don’t come up all that often, and then we have to refer back to seven different ordinances to figure out what’s exactly in there for us to be able to enforce.”

The conversation was sparked by an effort in Riverside to reform some city codes based on groundwork from other cities.

“That kind of started the conversation of, ‘Hey, maybe we should take a look at this and try to get things more uniform,’” Schneider said.

The effort won’t entail a major overhaul of municipal laws according to Schneider, but focus on those with frequent calls but notable inconsistencies.

“Some of the more common ones would be like curfew, animals at large, animal bites, burning,” he said. “Those are some of the ones that we get called upon by the city for their local ordinances.”

The process of changing city code, of course, is not the sheriff’s call, and will fall to the cities involved. That hurdle is not lost on the county office, which tried and failed to push similar efforts around 20 years ago.

“At the end of the day it’s their ordinance, and I think that’s where we’ve maybe had some struggles in the past, making them the same,” Schneider said. “Each makeup of a city council might want something a little bit different and at the end of the day, we ended up with maybe seven different curfew times. And for our guys out there enforcing that, they have to keep that separated in their minds.”

Kalona City Administrator Ryan Schlabaugh said changes would have to strike a balance between uniformity and city autonomy.

“The goal is not to have any community not be able to create the ordinance that they want, but maybe there are some that we could craft a more uniform regulation on,” he said. “It’s not a heavy-handed response, it’s, ‘What does everybody think their community would and wouldn’t support?’”

Schlabaugh said the process was in its earliest stages, and stressed that change would not come quickly.

“This is not a quick process,” Schlabaugh said. “This is probably months if not longer to be able to come up with (these) and get everybody on the same page … It may not happen for everything, but maybe we can take some that we agree to and make some changes to help with the uniformity.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com