Council wrestles with property rules

To say Baker City’s Property Maintenance ordinance is a work in progress assumes city councilors are making actual progress.

They are, to be sure. But at a work session Tuesday morning, councilors didn’t have all the progress they’ve made so far in front of them.

They had a draft of the ordinance, with changes highlighted in red. But some changes councilors said that they’d agreed to previously had been omitted from the most recent draft.

That posting will occur no later than July 7, one week ahead of the next City Council meeting.

During that meeting, Mayor Dennis Dorrah said, councilors will be interested only in hearing from the public. They won’t schedule a vote on whether to approve the first or second reading of the ordinance.

Three readings are required before the ordinance takes effect.

Ordinance 3292 is needed, according to its preamble, because the City Council finds that “unsafe, unsanitary and otherwise improperly maintained premises and structures ... adversely affect the value, utility and habitability of the property within the city as a whole. In addition to the obvious hazards which these conditions pose to public health, safety and welfare, they specifically cause substantial damage to adjoining and nearby property.”

The purpose of the proposed regulations is three-fold:

• to supplement existing city ordinances and further define as public nuisances “those conditions which constitute visual blight ...”

• to develop regulations that promote “sound maintenance of property, enhance the livability, the community appearance and the social, economic and environmental conditions of the community”

• to establish guidelines for the correction of violations and nuisances “that afford due process and procedural guarantees to affected property owners.”

City councilors took out their red pens Tuesday, striking a section defining as a nuisance “building and/or structure exteriors, walls and fences which are maintained in such condition as to become so defective, unsightly or in such condition of deterioration or disrepair that the same causes depreciation of the values of surrounding property or is materially detrimental to nearby properties” and is “significantly out of character with the surrounding neighborhood.”

“That is materially different than anything we have ever done before,” Collins told councilors. “If your house is worth $40,000 less because of your neighbor, you have suffered a material loss, but where does the government get involved? If I were a regular city manager (and the ordinance passed with that language included), I would need a big budget for abatement.”

Councilor Milo Pope was the first to suggest deleting the portion of the preamble that talks about unkempt and unsightly properties. Pope deemed that language “subjective and probably unconstitutional.”

“It’s hard to believe anybody in the city would use that language for an enforcement action,” said Planning Director Don Chance. “As regulators we would be very uncomfortable doing that.”

Councilor Clair Button said he’s heard from people that the use of words such as “unkempt” and “unsightly” is “the issue that people want addressed. The issue here is blight. We are trying to keep neighborhoods neat and attractive, and as a community pride issue I think that objective is important to people.”

Collins, Baker City’s former city attorney, said he wants the subcommittee to rework a chapter called “Notice of Violation,” Section 97.16. He said the current proposal could tie a judge’s hands once a property owner has been cited.

“From the court’s perspective,” said Pope, a former circuit court judge, “the ordinance is better written if the judge has some discretion.”

“But at some point,” Button said, “the city should be able to intervene and deal with a nuisance so we don’t have a 15-year open sore.”

Chance said that most of the section in question came from a Baker City Police Department proposal.

“The frustration for (police) is that the judge piles on fine after fine, liens are placed against the property, but the fundamental problem doesn’t get fixed,” he said. “Shannon (Regan, the city’s code enforcement officer) says that there has to be another solution. From what the police department has said, the levying of fines doesn’t get the job done.”

Collins said that Regan’s problem could be that she isn’t getting the support she needs in court on nuisance cases. The city employs attorney Dan Van Thiel on an hourly basis, but has no city attorney on staff.

“It is the city manager’s job to enforce city ordinances,” Collins said. “It seems like Shannon didn’t get the support she needed from the people she needed in court.”