For those who are online, we're just waiting for another member of the committee to show up so we can have a quorum.

So it'll be another couple minutes.

Hi, this is uh Ms.

Galesis, and uh it is March 2nd, uh 2026, and this is our economic development and code uh code enforcement committee meeting.

Uh

at the beginning of each meeting, we have a a three uh 15-minute public comment period.

Anyone who wishes to make a public comment, please raise your hand uh using the raise the hand feature in the zoom appearance

all

right.

Uh nobody has signed up up on the paper inside uh in the council chambers and nobody online's coming forward, so uh we'll go ahead and get started on the uh material for the regular agenda for the committee meeting.

All right, uh good evening.

Um I just wanted to take an opportunity at the meeting, uh the committee meeting to kind of provide the committee an update uh from our code enforcement department.

Uh

so we put together a couple slides.

Uh we the city maintains um a code enforcement website.

I got the tabs up here, but um you can go right to the city website and go under your government and planning department, and there's a code enforcement and licensing sec licensing section.

Uh but we we maintain a list of cases that have been closed going back to 2018.

Um, and we also keep a current list as of January 1st of any of the open cases.

And our code enforcement uh department um pretty much uh does a report every month.

They update this where they uh provide some pictures as to um you know what is the before and after picture of of the violation, and we just try to chart our progress and and make these available to you on council and and the public so they can kind of see the progress that the code enforcement officers are making within the community.

So just wanted to kind of reiterate that uh for folks again.

Um let's go back there we go.

Yep.

So again, you know, it's right off of our website.

Uh

we have a list of all of our open violations, and then every uh at the end of each year we'll do that summary report, which I uh try to tag on our um either the January or February department report that's in this in the council meetings.

Uh we also have a uh civic access portal where um uh customers, even in-house employees can go on and you can look up information about properties.

Uh they pulled over about 10 years' worth of information uh from our old system into the newer Tyler system, but you can look up licenses and permits and code violations by address.

So there is a public uh facing uh website where you can actually type in if you're trying to investigate to see if you have any violations on your property or if you have a question about uh another property nearby you that you may think, you know.

Let me see if there's a violation on it.

You should you can look those things up on our website

now.

Um

and and just kind of keeping a running list of you know, this is going back to to 2018.

Um we we keep statistics on the number of new cases, new new notice of violations that are issued.

Um we try to exclude the ones that are for grass cutting because those are more like routine.

We know we're gonna get those, they're easy to remedy.

We can cut the grass, charge the customer and the property owner.

But you you can kind of see that our um case counts have kind of generally increased over the past uh seven or eight years.

Um so you know, back in 2018 we're at 342 new cases, so uh we were double that uh here in 2025 with 749.

Um and same thing with our cases closed, you know.

It's you know it's one thing that we have to go around and be able to identify all the code violations, but it also takes a lot of effort to follow through and follow up to get those code violations closed out.

So you can see we're up you know from 145 from 2018 up to 484 cases closed this year.

Um and you know, we do have we have the three code enforcement officers.

We'll touch on this in a little bit, but um you know, one code official uh primarily oversees the rental program, while we have the other two code officials that are um doing the proactive and reactive um inspections of the exterior properties for half the town each.

So, you know, they're that's how we're generating these violations, and um like I said, they they have their territories where they have their responsibilities to kind of get these things addressed.

On the rental program, you know, we have the rental license program.

Every landlord's required to register their rental units each year.

It's a $50 registration fee per unit.

We currently do our rental inspections on a four-year inspection cycle, and it's by ward.

Uh this year we're starting.

Um we started last month with uh the Windward on the River project in Ward 3, so we're doing ward three this year.

Um so the rental inspections check for compliance with our property maintenance code, which is the same thing that the code officials do for all the properties in town for the exterior, but we can also have the ability to get in and do uh housing inspections on the inside, make sure that they're living in um clean safe housing.

Um here's some statistics for our rental program over the last seven or eight years.

Um back in 2018 was the first year we actually did a proactive um inspection.

We started proactive inspections in 2018.

Uh we had been requiring the the registration and the licensing since 2004, but we just didn't have the staffing level until 2018 to kind of start um requesting and doing everybody.

Uh so you can see we did the entire city in two years.

Uh, that was with the addition of a dedicated code official, along with we had uh a contract that council had approved with a third party um company to do rental inspections to kind of get us caught up.

So once we got through those initial first two years, we stopped with that um third party contract and we went to the more uh manageable four-year cycle on the on the rental inspections.