By T. Scott Boatright
With no old or new business on the agenda, Grambling’s City Council meeting for the month of August Thursday night at City Hall was simply a series of reports.
One of those reports came from Larry Walters, certified Building Official and floodplain manager for Institute for Building Technology & Safety (IBTS), who went into detail about what his company can do for Grambling for services including accessibility code servers, building inspections, building permits, fire code and inspection, floodplain management, plan reviews, planning and zoning, property maintenance and stormwater services after recently being contracted by the city to do so.
“(Grambling Mayor Alvin Bradley) asked me to come tonight and explain what we propose to do as far as property maintenance is concerned,” Walters said. “Property maintenance deals with blighted companies
“The first thing we typically do is look over the property maintenance ordinance you have and make suggestions as to whether you might need to adopt a new ordinance or add penalties to help us to actually get something accomplished with it because it’s got to have some teeth to it. What you have may be just fine. Once I review it, then we’ll come back with a recommendation as far as finding the best approach to adopt a new one or keep the one currently in place.”
Walters said that is done after lessons learned handling property maintenance before.
“We started several years ago with the city of Tallulah doing property maintenance for them,” Walters said. “And we had all these cases and we struggled with it. We had many violations and had to do a lot of paperwork. And it didn’t work that well. We started out by giving people a chance to clean their property up before we started demolition, which I think is a very good idea.
“And we did accomplish quite a bit by doing that by letting them know. That’s one of the good things about a new ordinance. We gave (those property owners) six months before it was going to become effective and get brought before a magistrate. (The city of Tallulah) bought door hangers and pamphlets and had council members hand them out. (Tallulah’s City Council) did everything they could to get the word out about the new ordinance taking effect.”
Walters said that in a lot of cases, that worked without the city having to take any actions. But the cases dealing with owners living out of town had a much lesser response in cleaning up blighted properties.”
“Those owners had property in Tallulah and lived in California and all over,” Walters said. “And sometimes there might be 10 of them that owned (shares of) the same property. They didn’t have to live there anyway, weren’t going to live there, and weren’t going to do anything.
“We started approaching that by trying to get them to come before the city. We wrote them up and learned some lessons. We also took over the city of Vidalia and started doing that a little differently. We had an attorney that the city hired to use as their magistrate. She had gone to New Orleans and sat in on property maintenance hearings there. She’s a city judge now.”
Walters said she would give blighted property owners 30 or 60 days to clean up their property before they were fined.
“They had to come back and prove to her they were cleaning their property up,” Walters said. “The ones that lived off (away), she would allow one representative for that property to come and sit in on the hearing.”
Walters said ITBS recently started doing something for a smaller town in Jackson Parish.
“They had an attorney doing theirs and what he’s doing is a little bit different take on that,” Walters said. “If nobody appears, and that happens sometimes, nobody shows up no matter how many letters are sent out. Even if they’re sent out as a certified letter, (the property owner) won’t accept it.
“So, what he’s doing is, the mayor is appointing an attorney to represent (the property owner) whether they want it or not, and that goes on their (property) tax bill. We just had our first one and next month there’s going to be another one. It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out, but I think that’s a good take on that.”
Walters said the city of Vidalia’s approach was that the city wasn’t tearing down any more buildings.
“That’s what we want our attorneys to force the landowners to pay for the bills for that,” Walters said. “We tore down about 35 structures as a city. There is an 18-month redemption time that you have to allow (blighted property owners) to have an opportunity to come back and come back and redeem that property. So there is a period of time in there. That’s a legal issue that’s a part of this.
“What ITBS does is that we interpret the code, we write the report and look at things like if the foundation is bad or the roof is sagging or there’s holes in the roof, and we cite the exact code numbers that address specific code violations. That’s why it’s important to have a property code for a structure. The one we recommend is pretty much the international property maintenance code that’s put out by ICC (the International Code Council). It’s really well-written. We’ve had a lot of jurisdictions — Springhill is involved in it, I know Eros is about to do it, Vidalia and Tallulah did.”
Walters said that cities that have adopted the international property maintenance code gives ITBS and a city it represents a basis to create property maintenance ordinances.
“It gives penalties, it gives fines, it gives steps, it gives appeal processes — it has all of that already written in the code,” Walters said. “A city just puts in the codes it wants. It’s got some blanks to fill in that the city can put into (a local ordinance) what it chooses. I can send a copy of what we’re done and go ahead and have Grambling’s name on it.
“But if you want to just wait and let me look at what you have now, then I’ll review it first and then make recommendations on where to do next.”
Walters said the process is complaint based.
“We don’t drive around looking for blighted properties,” he said. “We take complaints that have to be filtered through the city administration. And (a city administration) can decide they want to handle the matter in a different way.
“There’s a fee that the city pays for our report, but we don’t charge much and we don’t charge much to come to a hearing. But it does help the community. It’s hard to enforce because sometimes politically it’s not positive, especially if the owner is someone from town. But we’ve had churches involved in it. We’ve had garden clubs involved in it that get people behind and that helps build support from the public.”
Walters said the same thought process works in building permits, which ITBS also handles.
“Nobody likes being told what to do,” Walters said. “But if you get your community behind it, and you get your council behind it, and your people behind it, then it works.”
Walters told the City Council that the next step is reviewing the current property ordinance while also publicizing the fact that the process is being put into action.
“Get the word out some,” Walters said. “Let your constituents know that you’re working on this. They don’t want (blighted property) next door. We can help you do it right so it doesn’t backfire on you.”
