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Cracking down on eyesores |
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Written by Gerald Gauthier LETHBRIDGE HERALD
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Thursday, November 12 2009, 8:33 PM |
There’s one in almost every neighbourhood — that homeowner or renter whose yard, cluttered with junk, makes you wince every time you walk or drive past.
Thankfully, city hall is looking to streamline the way it handles complaints about such eyesores with the aim of speeding up their cleanup.
City council has ordered administration to conduct a review of the city’s unsightly premises bylaw and report back in December with options which would reduce the time it takes to deal with such complaints. Under the current process, it can take two to three months to deal with property owners who ignore clean-up requests from bylaw enforcement officers.
That’s leading to frustration for some complainants, according to Duane Ens, regulatory services manager for the City of Lethbridge.
“By the time they make the call, they’ve been living with it for a little bit (already),” he said. “There’s no way we should allow what some of these people have to live beside.”
The city typically receives about 300 such complaints each year. Most are received during the spring and summer.
Each complaint is assessed first, and if deemed legitimate, the offending property owner will contacted by a bylaw enforcement officer and given some time — usually a few weeks — to comply voluntarily. If the first deadline passes with no action, the matter is brought before city council which directs a second notice to be served advising the property owner of the date of a hearing at which he or she can provide an explanation to council.
After the hearing, council can authorize a third and final notice giving the owner 15 more days to comply after which the city can then hire a contractor to do the clean up and bill the owner.
Such costs can range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on the amount of junk to be removed, said Ens.
In the past, only four or five cases each year came before council, but so far this year as many as 15 non-compliance cases have been brought to council’s attention.
“People just aren’t responding like they did in the past. People aren’t being as co-operative as they have been in the past,” he said. “The vast majority still co-operate to some extent. You give them a little bit of time to work on it, and they usually get it done.”
Part of the reason for the increase, he said, may be that his department has more enforcement capacity now than it did in the past.
The review is to include a comparison of practises in other Western Canadian cities. Ens is to present his recommendations to council on Dec. 14.
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