A closed-door committee now will decide when code enforcement liens should be forgiven
In New Orleans' war on blight, citations and liens are City Hall's primary weapons for bringing derelict property owners in line.
View full sizeThe real hammer in the city's blight-fighting tool box may be sheriff's sales. If derelict owners don't fix their properties after a citation or a judgment, the sheriff can move in and seize and sell the property at auction.But keeping track of who should and shouldn't be a target of enforcement actions has not been easy.
That's why the city introduced a new process Monday to use a closed-door committee to decide when code enforcement liens should be forgiven.
Critics say the process has been too haphazard, both when it comes to citing blighted properties and when it comes to removing outdated judgments once someone fixes up a once-blighted property.
Purchasers and renovators of blighted properties say they've been caught in the cross hairs of code enforcement one too many times, and they are cautiously optimistic that the new review committee, set up by assistant city attorney Brenda Breaux and blight czar Jeff Hebert, will bring some order to the process.
Ed McGinnis III and Maggie Carroll are both extremely active in cleaning up their neighborhoods, but both were slapped with liens and fines after they bought up blighted properties with the intent of rehabilitating them.
McGinnis bought a blighted house in the Irish Channel, fixed it up, rented the apartments and, after several trips to City Hall, got the liens that had been imposed against the former derelict homeowner removed.
That neighborhood success story earned the house on Fourth Street a feature in The Times-Picayune's "StreetWalker" column in March. It was lauded by the Preservation Resource Center.
And on April 6, it was cited again for blight by the city's code enforcement office.
"I had to come in no less than a dozen times," McGinnis said. "I applaud hearing that there's a new policy in effect, but we talk about these things too much and they're just not happening."
Carroll had a similar experience in Broadmoor, where Councilwoman Stacy Head praised her work in rebuilding the community. Her efforts got the house next to hers declared blighted, and she put her money where her mouth was by buying it to renovate. But she was blitzed by code enforcement because of a lien that wasn't brought to her attention when she bought the property.
She said it took five months of constant badgering to learn there was a lien-waiver form she could sign. That form was not available online or by fax, she was informed; it could only be picked up in person at City Hall.
Hebert said he could get the form on the city's website immediately.
"There is a perceived ambiguity here," Carroll told the City Council's Housing and Human Needs Committee. "The whole process is the definition of inefficiency."
Head said she hopes the new review committee will be more efficient, although it doesn't appear it will be transparent. Head got Breaux to agree to post the results of the committee's votes once they're done, but the meetings will not be public.
Jennifer Farwell, president of the Mid-City Neighborhood Association, urged a more public process. She said community stakeholders should have a chance to weigh in, in case the city is considering forgiving a lien on a property whose owner has a history of shirking responsibility.
She also bemoaned the city's propensity for forgiving liens so blighted houses can be purchased and simply demolished.
"Vacant lots do not revitalize this city," she said.
Head said the decision to forgive a lien or judgment can be a delicate one. Responsible homeowners want their derelict neighbors to be punished, but sometimes the benefit of a sale, so a property can be rebuilt, can outweigh the need to penalize.
"If we only look at it myopically and just say we have to penalize the bad guys, then we might lose," she said. "Because that bad guy is not going to fix the property, but if we lower the fine ... we might get someone in there, a new owner who might fix it up."
The real hammer in the city's blight-fighting tool box may be sheriff's sales. If derelict owners don't fix their properties after a citation or a judgment, the sheriff can move in and seize and sell the property at auction.
There are 11 properties scheduled for a sheriff's sale on June 2, and 28 more are on the block for June 14. Head, who helped craft legislation in 2007 to give Orleans Parish the power to hold sheriff's sales, said she hopes the threat of seizure and sale will drive some of the current owners to bring their properties up to code.
"Maybe those numbers will go down because when we say sheriff sale, sometimes the owners have an epiphany that we're really serious as a city," she said.
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David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3322.