Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
The Richland Hills City Council met on August 24, 2026, starting with a work session at 5:31 p.m. and convening the regular meeting at approximately 6:30 p.m. The agenda centered on code enforcement strategy, adoption of the Fiscal Year 2027 budget, ratification of a property tax increase, and setting the FY2027 tax rate.
Microphones on, everybody. Good evening. I'll now call the work session of the Richmond Hill City Council to order. The time is five thirty-one. Item one is discussion of the items listed on tonight's City Council agenda. No formal action will be taken during the work session. Each action item will be considered during the regular session. Jason, or some items you want to go over for us. It's a discussion item regarding the city's code compliance community strategy, including tree limbs. By grass and weeds and other approaches to increase compliance. Jason, can you present this item to us? Yes, sir. We talked a couple meetings ago about the tree limbs and the letters that went out, and I just wanted to come back to you and give you an update on that. We have had several compliance properties comply with that. We have also not pursued any citations related to those at this point in time, but we did receive some uh quite a bit of compliance. Um but going forward, uh, we'll continue to monitor those uh not just those properties but high grass and weeds, anything urgent as far as far as our code compliance strategy. And I've talked to a few of you about this, but when we when we look at code compliance, if you think about a pendulum, okay, we can go all the way to one side where we're like an HOA. You know, it's every time there's a violation, we immediately send an NOV a notice of violation. They have seven to ten days, depending on what it is, to remediate for a citation is issued. Um what that means is we immediately send out the letter, we come back and we have to reinspect after that seven day ten day period. JP is it ten or seven? Seven days. Um, and so that is a follow-up process that we'd have to employ, uh, which we do, but uh to ensure that every time there's a notice of violation issued, we're we're now utilizing both iWorks and Trello to be more efficient in that process, also to track so that staff, myself and uh JP and his team uh can see where code issues have had those issues the compliance letters sent. So there's the the pendulum where we're sending the immediately the immediate notice of violation. Um then there's the other pendulum. If you swing it back the other way, we have the courtesy letters that we could send out to say, hey, just maybe you may not have known, but there are uh subdivision and code compliance requirements as a property owner in the city, and so we want to bring these to your attention. You are in technical violation of this specific one or multiple, and we are asking for your help to comply. And then beyond that, if nothing is returned or commented or anything's done, then we move into a notice of violation. And in some cases, uh, we have provided courtesy notices in multiple occasions to try to assist before notice of violations entered. Obviously, I think both extremes um don't really work well, and for counsel's benefit, you're gonna get complaints on both ends. You're not hard enough, you're you're not you know, staff's not you know making these property owners clean up, or you're too hard on citizens that can't do some of these things themselves. So we just wanted to have this as a counsel direction of obviously we're gonna use common sense, and I think with our code officers, that's what they do. Um, but we want to prioritize what you believe to be the urgent matters that hey, these things need to go straight to a notice of violation, or repeat offenders need to go straight to a violation. Um the city doesn't have the resources to go abate every single problem. We can't go mow everybody's yard just because we can put a lien on the property, doesn't mean we're ever gonna get that revenue back. Um, in some cases where it's a health life safety issue, we would recommend abatement. Um, so and we have done those over the last year and beyond uh prior. So I wanted to ask council some for some direction so we can pass it along to staff on number one. What are those urgent matters that you want us to really focus on, and then two, what's kind of communication strategy to the residents? We can do educational campaigns.