City’s tough choice on nuisances

Baker City officials should enforce, as fairly as possible, every ordinance that’s in effect.

Baker City officials should not use those ordinances as the pretext for writing as many tickets as possible.

Shannon Regan, who as the city’s community service officer enforces the city’s ordinance that prohibits people from piling trash and other “public nuisances” (as the ordinance defines them), seems to understand this.

When Baker City Herald reporter Chris Collins went along with Regan for a couple hours earlier this month, Regan stopped to talk with a man who had kindled a debris fire.

The man inadvertently put a plastic milk jug in his burn pile. Burning plastics is illegal in the city because they can produce poisonous vapors.

That’s just how such situations ought to turn out.

The man’s neighbors didn’t have to worry about inhaling toxic smoke, and the episode cost the man nothing but some time.

Matters such as illegal burning should be among Regan’s, and the city’s, top priorities because they can threaten people’s health or safety.

That’s why the nuisance ordinance requires, for instance, that people either remove the door from a broken refrigerator or freezer if they store the appliance on their property, or lock it if it’s used outdoors.

The city’s task gets complicated, though, when officials try to enforce ordinance provisions that deal not with inherently or even potentially dangerous situations, but with ones which, for lack of a better term, constitute “eyesores.”

The City Council is slated, within the next year or so, to approve new versions of many ordinances, including ones dealing with public nuisances.

The city’s goal is to modernize its ordinances, make sure they’re not at loggerheads with state law, and purge the ordinances, some of which date to the 1950s, of obsolete language — for instance, the public nuisance ordinance prohibits people from using “gramophones” or “victrolas” in a way that “disturbs persons in the vicinity.” The ordinance is silent, though, on the matter of MP3 players.

We urge city officials, and the City Council before it votes, to ask residents what they think about how broad the sweep of the city’s ordinances ought to be.

We doubt anyone would argue against the city striving to ensure this is a safe place. No one should have to worry that rats are going to infest his property because the neighbor stashes trash in his back yard.

We’re not certain, though, that citizens’ feelings are universal about whether the city should try to define, in its laws, which person’s yard is just plain ugly, and which one is so hideous that it warrants a citation.