Move to compliance long overdue

We are pleased to hear that County Administrator Roman Gastesi plans to continue moving forward on his proposal to make the county’s code enforcement department more responsive to the needs of the constituencies it serves.

For far too long, this county’s code enforcement department has been a figurative shoot-first, ask-questions-later operation.

Local business owners and residents open their mailbox at the end of the day and find a letter from Monroe County Code Enforcement nestled among the payments, bills, social letters and solicitations.

Often, the letter is a notice of violation for something the offender had absolutely no knowledge of, and could have fixed in a matter of minutes.

From such actions, tempers rise.

What Gastesi heard during a series of citizen meetings last year was that everyone’s blood pressure could stay at much more manageable levels if code officers would simply get out of the vehicle, knock on the door, and inform someone what must be done to remedy the situation.

The issue reached a boiling point in January last year after a code sweep where officers drove in front of businesses or through parking lots and cited nearly 150 businesses for temporary sign usage, most of them pennants or sandwich boards.

A good percentage of the businesses cited were those that had been in operation only a short period of time. They saw sandwich boards and pennants being used, saw no enforcement of same, and considered them a good idea for a slowing economy.

We understand that just because one doesn’t know the rules doesn’t mean one doesn’t have to live by said rules.

What we fail to understand is why our neighbors, for every code officer in the county lives next door to someone we all know, couldn’t give us a courtesy handshake and a few moments of time informing us, thereby alleviating our lack of knowledge.

In many of those cases, the offending party would have simply walked out to the road’s edge and pickled up the offending sign, thereby agreeing to the rule in the future.

And then, armed with knowledge, the offending party couldn’t act surprised if the same scenario played out in the future.

What we got, however, was an uprising of local business owners who were given no opportunity to correct what is a relatively simple violation.

So we had hours spent by our elected leadership to address the issue, with directives to our paid staff to address the issue, with hours more to formulate a plan that included talking to the vary same people that would have been covered in the initial conversation, and hours of time, by dozens of people, to bring that issue to some reasonable conclusion.

We, the taxpayer, spent tens of thousands in man hours to search for a reasonable path to compliance for something that could have been taken care of with a 60-second individual conversation, albeit 150 times.

We are pleased to see our growth management division, under whose purview code enforcement operates, changing internal policies to make sure citations aren’t issued when they’re not due, clogging up the special magistrate’s docket while the alleged offender proves they didn’t deserve to be there in the first place.

Most reasonable people, if they have issues with a neighbor, someone whom they will run across in many other social areas, will lean across the proverbial fence and talk about the issue, thereby imparting knowledge in both directions.

We hope this is the culture Gastesi hopes to instill, and the culture our current crop of code personnel are willing to transition into.

We also understand that some folks will refuse conciliatory advances. And we understand the need to spend time and money forcing compliance from those who act in that fashion.

But if we follow Gastesi’s suggestions, we might find we have a whole lot more time to spend on a few, than little to no time to spend on dozens.

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