With each day, the air gets a little warmer, the sun shines a little brighter, and before you know it the grass will be a foot tall and the paint on the siding will be peeling. Sorry to ruin that perfect picture, but in the Planning and Economic Development Department, that's what we think about when spring arrives.
Property maintenance complaints kick into high gear during late spring and into summer. Often times it's people leaving junk or trash lying around their house. Sometime it's a feud between two neighbors trying to get the other in trouble. Nevertheless, property maintenance is one of the biggest problems we have when it comes to housing in Elizabethton. The property maintenance problems help contribute to the lack of quality housing and low home values that data sources suggest we have here. Additionally, unmaintained properties contribute to blight and can make entire neighborhoods undesirable.
Each year since I've been in my current position we have tried to set up our game when it comes to property maintenance. One year we adopted new, modern, nationally accepted standards for property maintenance – the International Property Maintenance Code. The year after that we developed and implemented the neighborhood sweep program where four staff members spend an entire morning canvassing a neighborhood going door-to-door identifying property maintenance issues and notifying the property owner. The neighborhood is then reviewed again for compliance. This programs starts in April each year and end in October. We have seen a lot of success with this program!
Our improvement this year is our online reporting system. Implementing this program will allow citizens and residents to report our most common property maintenance violations online. Citizens can also submit a picture of the property so that the Code Officer can get a better idea of the violation. Once the violation has been submitted, our officer can review and visit the site to determine whether there is a property maintenance violation.
The goal of this program is to make reporting these properties more accessible and not to require a visit to city hall to report a violation. Additionally, it will give our staff more eyes on the street so that we can find violations early before they become worse.
What are your thoughts on the role of property maintenance in our community? What else do you think we can or should be doing to combat property maintenance violations? Let's talk about it!
Visit http://www.elizabethton.org/departments/report_a_violation.php to report a violation.
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