The Daily News

Last year, Bowling Green’s Code Enforcement Department created 6,133 new records documenting possible property code violations.

The department’s four code enforcement officers conducted 8,663 inspections, handed out 2,309 notices of violations, issued 369 citations and closed 5,818 records.

City Code Enforcement Coordinator Alex Colovos said his department is adequately staffed – for now.

“In the last four years, complaints have steadily gone down,” Colovos said. “Right now, we’re pretty well maxed out (with the workload). I don’t believe we would be able to take on any more.”

In Bowling Green and other communities, code enforcement has taken on a significance that may not have been emphasized in previous years.

Now, successfully resolving a complaint (by ridding a property owner’s yard of junk cars and other debris, for instance) carries meaning beyond a code enforcement department simply doing its job – it signals that a municipality cares greatly about quality of life.

Viewed through that prism, the more officers a city is willing to pay for and the faster code violations are resolved, the greater regard that city has for its quality of life.

“When it comes to code enforcement, there are varied perspectives among cities,” said J.D. Chaney, an attorney for the Kentucky League of Cities. “I think in a lot of places where you see cities trying to be aggressive with code enforcement, that’s an extension of citizen response.”

From his perspective, Chaney says that a city’s main purpose is to ensure a quality of life for its citizens by establishing governing boards and levying taxes.

“If someone has a dilapidated building, that’s obviously going to affect everybody around it,” Chaney said.

The awareness of code enforcement as a quality-of-life issue is not limited simply to candidates for municipal office running on a platform to literally “clean up the city.”

A bill that recently passed both houses in the General Assembly amends state law to allow third- and fourth-class cities in Kentucky to establish a nuisance board. These boards can conduct hearings for violations of any ordinance that a city wants it to enforce, including property codes. (The state defines a third-class city as having a population of between 8,000 and 19,999 and a fourth-class city as having a population of 3,000 to 7,999.)

“Traditionally, the only way for those cities to abate nuisances was to cite them as a criminal offense,” said state Rep. Arnold Simpson, D-Covington, who co-sponsored the bill. “What we found in northern Kentucky was that code inspectors were spending an inordinate amount of time in district court, and other criminal cases weren’t getting the attention that they perhaps deserved.”

Prior to becoming a legislator, Simpson served as Covington’s city manager. He was approached by Park Hills Mayor Mike Hellmann about drafting a bill to allow smaller cities to establish nuisance boards.

Heading a city with older housing stock that was gradually transitioning from owner-occupied housing to rental properties, Simpson said code enforcement emerged as a high priority.

“When those homes changed from owner-occupied to a rental circumstance, that led in some instances to properties not being maintained properly, resulting in a slew of code violations,” Simpson said.

Legislation passed by the state in 1992 offered Kentucky’s more populous cities the option of creating a nuisance enforcement board – essentially an extra-judicial body that can issue rulings on nuisance complaints. In the time since then, code enforcement has become a more highly publicized issue, Simpson said, with an emphasis placed on public safety.

Simpson has heard complaints from some people who believe the process of resolving a complaint takes too long. The most effective way to improve enforcement, he said, would be to adequately staff the code enforcement office.

“Speaking as a citizen, I think (Covington’s) nuisance board works well,” Simpson said. “Sometimes you cannot make circumstances disappear overnight. You have to give people reasonable notice and grant them due process.”