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Nuisance property talks continue

Council discusses property ordinances, unsafe building notices

—Daily Freeman-Journal photo by Adri Sietstra Webster City City Manager Daniel Ortiz-Hernandez speaks Wednesday night during a public work session held by the council to discuss unsafe buildings, nuisance properties and city code.

Nuisance properties were discussed extensively during a work session held by the City Council of Webster City Wednesday evening.

Mayor John Hawkins stated that he spoke with Grid Iron Grill owner Burke Risetter Wednesday about getting the property next to the restaurant cleaned up as much as allowed by law.

“We’re looking at a couple different options, legally, of what can do,” said Webster City City Manager Daniel Ortiz-Hernandez. “Zach (Chizek, Webster City City Attorney) and I are still waiting on some clarification on some stuff before we can make a decision on what route to take.

According to Ortiz-Hernandez, the responsible party for the property is currently incarcerated.

Councilman Jim Talbot questioned being able to take action at the property due to health concerns.

“The city can’t do it without jumping through several hoops and hurdles legally, and certainly we don’t advise anyone to trespass on the property and try to do stuff. That’s the reason why it kind of creates a more time-consuming burden for us to jump through all of those recourses and take action,” Ortiz-Hernandez said.

Ortiz-Hernandez stated that they are waiting to hear back from the individual’s attorney, who is representing the individual in a criminal matter.

Councilman Logan Welch suggested thinking outside the box on this matter, along with other frustrating nuisance properties in Webster City.

“If we’re waiting on lawyers and stuff to get back to us, what else can we do in the interim to alleviate that issue? There just has to be something,” Welch said.

Citizens who attended the work session brought to the council’s attention more nuisance properties and continued to voice their frustrations with the amount of time each property has been neglected.

Ortiz-Hernandez explained that citizens are always welcome to bring nuisance properties to the city’s attention, but the purpose of the work session was to work toward finding a solution.

“We talked quite extensively on Monday on individual properties. The goal of this meeting today was to work through the specific processes and what the law actually allows us to do,” Ortiz-Hernandez said. “I think it would be beneficial for everyone instead of trying to focus on the individual properties and what has or hasn’t been done, let’s talk about what does our existing ordinance say. What does the state law permit us to do? What are our administrative actions internally that we follow? What can we look to change?”

The council discussed the possibility of making changes to the city’s current ordinance so that in the future, it would be easier to tackle a larger amount of properties and clean up Webster City.

“Let’s look at solutions and action items we can take from tonight’s meeting to get the ball rolling towards a solution,” Welch said.

Ortiz-Hernandez also explained that due to limited staff it is difficult to catch every broken ordinance and nuisance property.

“Currently, the way our system works and the way our code reads is one, it defines what nuisances are. I don’t think it’s a matter of us not enforcing nuisances. It’s part of the fact that we have one building inspector who doubles as our code enforcement officer…,” said Ortiz-Hernandez.

Ortiz-Hernandez went on to explain that the City of Webster City’s code is no different than what a number of cities have and what state statute allows.

“We can add more items. We can look to be more aggressive. But at the end of the day, the bottom line is it is no different than what other communities in Iowa currently have on their books and are utilizing to go after nuisance properties and unsafe properties,” Ortiz-Hernandez said.

Chizek suggested the possibility of starting with one specific region in town and cracking down on the ordinance enforcement to send a message to those who still have properties in need of repair.

“If you do a bunch of them you’re going to send a message to everybody to get going,” Chizek said. “Pick out certain areas of town and hit that area hard. Then move to the next one…if you did an area, you’d send a message.”

Councilman Brian Miller suggested digging deeper into the current ordinances and added more concrete definitions. Miller referenced the nuisance ordinances in Mason City as an example, who had very detailed code written for these instances.

“Maybe to get some of these (nuisance properties) to fill in there, we can add nuisance definitions to the ordinance so that we can make sure that we’re going to hold up in court,” Miller said.

Welch questioned if a more vague approach would benefit the enforcement of the nuisance property ordinances.

Chizek explained that in many cases, a more vague approach holds up in court in the majority of cases, but not for nuisance properties.

“In this situation, it’s better to list the nuisances because then you can point to a specific one and say ‘look there is garbage in the yard’,” said Chizek.

According to Welch, consistency in enforcing the current ordinance is important and necessary to show the community the city is taking the matter seriously.

“I think now we kind of need to commit to the community no excuses. We’re getting way more strict and tighter to the words of the ordinance, no matter what,” said Welch. “We just have to live by the book here until we get this under control.”

“After today, Logan and I and Karla and Ken and other staff will get together and take the comments and recommendations the council wants and then come back to them and put it on paper and say this is what you talked about, this is what it looks like, and possibly move forward with changing the ordinance or not or what other changes the council wants to be made,” said Ortiz-Hernandez.

According to Chizek, any possible changes will take time.

“This is different than a lot of the other ordinances that we’ve tweaked in a sense that there’s no varietic state code that is pretty adamant on certain things we can do,” said Chizek. “A lot of what we’re going to try to hammer out, we also then have to go back with the League of Cities and stuff to confirm. So I don’t want you all to think it’s coming short-term.”

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