The City of Tempe Hearing Officer, Vanessa McDonald, convened a public hearing on June 17, 2025, at 1:00 PM. The agenda included approval of the June 4, 2025, meeting minutes and a single abatement request for a property at 226 East Pebble Beach Drive. The hearing officer granted a 180-day open abatement for the property, which is encumbered with inoperable vehicles and junk trash debris.
Good afternoon. Today is Tuesday, June 17th, 2025, and this is the second hearing this month for the City of Tempe Hearing Officer. My name's Vanessa McDonald, and I'll be conducting the hearing this afternoon. I'm going to read something into the record and then we'll jump into our really short agenda this afternoon. The City of Tempe Hearing Officer is authorized by Arizona revised statutes in the City of Tempe zoning and development code. The hearing officer is granted the authority to conduct public hearings to decide upon the abatement of code violations occurring on properties within the city. These violations include deteriorated pools, structures, or landscaping, storage of junk or refuse, and inoperable or unregistered vehicles. Abatement actions are brought before the hearing officer by the city's code compliance division typically after numerous attempts at contacting the property owner to obtain voluntary compliance with the code. The hearing officer can issue an order directing the owner, occupant, property manager, or any other responsible person to remediate a code violation or may authorize the city to abate the property. The cost of the abatement is the responsibility of the owner of the property where the violation occurs and will be collected as an assessment against the property in violation. On today's agenda, we have two items. We have a set of minutes from June 4th, 2025, and one property abatement. Appeals are heard by the Board of Adjustment, after which they may also be appealed to Superior Court. A property owner has 14 days after the hearing officer's decision to either file an appeal or bring the property into code compliance. Applicant is the City of Tempe represented this afternoon by Code Inspector John Salazar. Good afternoon. Thank you, Madam Hearing Officer. Good afternoon. I'm a code compliance inspector with the City of Tempe Code Compliance Division. I'm here this evening to request 180-day open abatement for the property at 226 East Pebble Beach Drive. Tempe 85282. This complaint was initiated back on 722 of 24 for inoperable unregistered vehicles in the front and back of the property. Tracy said her uncle Donald Cup will not be able to bring the property into compliance and believes the city has no choice but to intervene. On 821-24, a final correction notice was sent to Mr. Cup as his residents outlining the violations and corrections needed to bring the property into compliance. On February 10th of this year, a citation was issued to Mr. Cup for the violations, and he failed to appear in court for that citation. Madam Hearing Officer, between 821 of 24 and May 5th of this year, the previous inspector and myself have had multiple conversations with Mr. Cup and his niece, Tracy Cup, regarding the code violations at the property, resulting in minimal improvements. I would now like to prevent provide some photos of the uh property taken today. Great, thank you. This is a photo of the front of the property. As you can see, there's two inoperable vehicles parked in the front and quite a bit of junk trash debris in the back of each vehicle kind of stacked up here on the uh front porch here. You can see the wheels on both the vehicles are flat, and you could tell that these are vehicles are inoperable. So from May to June, I'm looking at pictures from May. There was a van. Yes, ma'am. Is that operable? Uh no, he moved that to the backyard. We'll get to that shortly. Okay. He did move it, but it was moved to the backyard. Yes, ma'am. Second photo here. It's just a little bit of a close-up. I just wanted to kind of point out the junk trash debris that's kind of stacked up in between both vehicles and in the back of the pickup here. Um, as you can see, there's a license plate right here on this vehicle. I tried to zoom in as much as I can. It shows it was expired back in September of 23. Next photo is a picture of the backyard.