Good morning.

It's now 9 30 a.m.

on Friday, May 30th, 2025, and I'd like to welcome you to this special not special, but work session of the Huntsville City Council.

Today we will be discussing code enforcement, and we will have a presentation by the community development department to present updates regarding how they are increasing voluntary compliance and new ways owners may be held accountable for failure to maintain their properties.

Again, thank you this morning for giving us the opportunity to talk a little bit about community development and code enforcement and the ways that we can, as Mr.

Mary said, increase voluntary compliance, uh, strengthen our neighborhoods, and also help maintain a high quality of life for your constituents and your neighborhoods.

So first, let me talk a little bit about uh the what we're doing today.

So I will give a little bit of the administrative functions of what community development does, enforcing the current uh statutes and see the ordinances that we have, and then Mr.

Riley will take uh over a little bit on the legal side.

So, what are the legal issues that we have to uh abide by, like due process and expectations of privacy and a lot of the the legal remedies that we could follow.

Uh and then Mr.

David Knupp is here as outside counsel that can provide any uh questions that like how we are pursuing uh remedies through the circuit court.

And then what is new to you also is our new chief innovation officer, Mr.

Larry Lowe, uh ways that our official intelligence could assist us in some compliance within code enforcement.

Uh and then obviously at any point you have questions, we'll be glad to try to address those.

So, first a little bit about uh who we are.

So uh code enforcement, so we investigate property maintenance complaints.

Uh we conduct inspections, issue notices, and sometimes those notices uh may we may initiate legal actions to gain compliance.

Uh we work primarily through voluntary compliance.

That's our goal, so we can maintain the community standards, protect the public health safety, and preserve the our uh community property values.

Uh so the staff of community development is sixteen strong, so uh it's led by our co-enforcement manager, Mr.

Kim Webster here on the end.

Uh, and then there are two co-enforcement supervisors, uh, for compliance officers, seven housing inspectors, and two administrative support.

Uh, whenever a property uh needs to be brought into compliance, and the property owner has not done so.

Our neighborhood property compliance supervisor, Ms.

Kimberly Yerp here, so she actually coordinates getting a property, the grass cut, a junk uh and litter situation, no remedy uh within the area.

The map before you is actually how we have the city divided.

We have that divide into seven different areas.

As you see, there are seven housing inspectors.

Each one of those areas is assigned uh to one of those colored points.

Um last year we had a hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred and sixty housing units in Huntsville, so we tried to divide them evenly.

Uh however, looking at the age of properties, uh, some of the the newer subdivisions may not be prone to have as many violations of structure as an age and some of the more the core areas.

So uh a lot of thought goes into actually how we assign our housing inspectors, and we also rotate them just so they have a good feel for what happens throughout the city.

Um the there are 12 statutes and ordinances in which community development basically can issue notices under or take citations to court.

I'll focus initially on the first four, which obviously the most uh of concern to you are the grass and weeds and the junk and litter or inoperable vehicles.

Uh so several of the key takeaways are everything we do is based on a city uh ordinance or a state statute, and there's a timeliness factor.

So if you call me today that needs the property that we don't have under a notice, we have to get the notice under uh the property under notice, and then the property owner will be given 14 days to bring it into compliance, and then at that time for grass, we can issue a notice to go cut the grass.

Um on a junk litter and inoperable vehicle, that would be a 30-day notice.

Again, from the time we see it, the property owner has 30 days to bring it into compliance uh if it's on their property.

So again, everything we do is based on a timeless factor.

Quite often it's frustrating to me, as is probably many of your constituents.

They see it today and they think the city isn't doing anything, but waiting for a due process to play out.

So we again we're going based on what the city ordinance or the state statute provides.

Uh the the next two larger items that we address are the structure notices or unsafe buildings.

So a structure that is non-residential or residential and then an accessory structure.

So the owner would be given 120 days to rectify a problem.

Uh many of you may have the situation in a neighborhood, uh, hopefully it's isolated, but failure of a homeowner to maintain their property.

However, it doesn't rise to the level of a public nuisance.

So what where we have been previously is like we can go to municipal court.

Municipal court jurisdiction is to impose a fine uh and court cost, but they don't have the authority to enforce a an abatement or a corrective action on the property itself.

So we have some new methods that we're exploring now that we have been that legal can talk about of going through the circuit court method.

Um unsafe buildings.

So if we find a building that is uh dangerous to the life, health or the safety, public or occupants, you know, we will post that property uh and then we'll send a notice to the owner, uh, owner of record.

So one thing we all do with every property uh notice that goes out, we have to see who owns it, uh, who the property tax uh property tax assessor's owner of record is.

And then we also do a Huntsville utilities check to find out who if it's a tenant, because if it's grass, it's the tenant that's not not hope bringing it usually into uh compliance, so we would issue a notice to both tenant and owner.

Um again, the unsafe building is given uh 30 days to get necessary permits, and then it still may go into that as long as they have active permits and they're working on bringing the property into compliance.

Uh there are occasions where it sets for lengthy times, which Mr.

Riley can talk about, an out-of-state owner uh or you know, we have to we have to get a remedy beyond municipal court to try to bring those properties into compliance, and that would be the circuit court method.

So the the notice process now generally stems from a complaint uh or monitoring of the community.

So we have sort of reactive notices and proactive notices.