Last year, City Council passed the Chronic Nuisance Ordinance, which states generally that if you have three nuisance activities (tall grass, trash, dead trees, etc.) or two drug related criminal activities at the same location over a set time period, your property will be declared a chronic nuisance property and the cost of any future nuisance responses by the city will be billed to the property.
As with many things, an evaluation of our code enforcement and criminal activity aligned with the old 80/20 rule. 80% of the problems are caused by 20% of the properties. In our case, it may actually be closer to a 90/10 rule. This ordinance is designed to identify and take action against those 5-10% of the properties in the city that do not take action to curb ongoing nuisance activity in your neighborhoods.
The Ordinance required some software assistance from Information Systems and better coordination between code enforcement and the Middletown Division of Police. Staff has been working on this process most of the year and we will be rolling out enforcement of the chronic nuisance ordinance starting this week.
If there are questions about the ordinance or the enforcement, feel free to ask us. If you are worried about the City being heavy handed, there is an appeal process for each nuisance and for the designation as a chronic nuisance.
Our only goal here is to curb recurring nuisance activity in your neighborhoods. If the owner removes the cause of the nuisance, we go away and they don’t hear from us and your neighborhood is a little quieter, cleaner and safer than before.
We sincerely hope the citizens will work with us to clean up our neighborhoods and improve safety throughout the city. The only reason we exist is to make your life a little easier and better. We work hard on that every day.
Have a great week.
