Thomas MacMillan Photo
LCI’s Erik Johnson.
What’s the point of levying fines for housing code violations if the city doesn’t have the power to collect them?
That question emerged in City Hall’s Aldermanic Chamber last week as lawmakers grilled Livable City Initiative (LCI) head Erik Johnson on his department’s efforts to enforce housing and property standards.
The city doesn’t have the manpower and resources to effectively go after property owners who flout fines for code violations, Johnson said.
However, LCI is set to contract with a collection agency to pursue residential licensing fees and fines, and that effort could expand to other fines the agency hands out, he said.
In the meantime, “Why bother?” asked Hill Alderwoman Andrea Jackson-Brooks during a Wednesday evening meeting of the aldermanic Finance Committee. She and East Rock Alderwoman Jessica Holmes asked Johnson to reconsider the cost-benefit ratio having his staff issue fines the city has so much trouble collecting.
Johnson stressed that LCI fines are intended to improve compliance, not to be a money-maker for the city.
LCI has three main ways to collect money while enforcing housing laws: fees, fines, and liens. LCI collects fees for its residential licensing program, which requires landlords to submit rental units to regular inspections. LCI issues fines for, say, violating the city’s anti-blight ordinance or, theoretically, for failure to pay the residential licensing fee.
LCI can also sometimes place liens on properties. For instance, if a property owner fails to fix a hole in a roof, the city can have the work done and then put a lien on the property for that amount. Liens are generally not collected until the sale of the property.
Altogether in 2010, 2011, 2012, and so far in 2013, LCI placed a total of $1,229,779.51 in liens and collected on $420,250.79, according to information from LCI’s Frank D’Amore.
Between July 1, 2012, and March 26, 2013, LCI issued $77,000 worth of fines to property owners who violated the city’s anti-blight ordinance, but collected on none of those fines during that same time period.
Wednesday evening’s exchange between aldermen and Johnson came up halfway through a marathon four-hour budget deliberation meeting of the Board of Aldermen’s Finance Committee. The committee is combing through Mayor John DeStefano’s proposed $503 million budget for the coming fiscal year. The committee heard from about 10 city departments, each seeking to justify it’s piece of the budget pie.
Johnson outlined some of LCI’s accomplishments in the last year, including some 3,500 inspections completed under the city’s residential licensing program, which requires landlords of multi-unit rental properties to pay an annual fee for LCI inspections.
Under the program, property owners face a $250 fine for not paying their licensing fee. Johnson said the city has not yet issued any such fines. “We haven’t been issuing fines since we changed the law” last year, Johnson said. The licensing program last year changed its fee schedule. Johnson said LCI has been giving property owners time to get used to the new system, “That’s going to stop soon.”
On Wednesday, Johnson told Holmes that his department doesn’t have enough resources to track down all the property owners and make sure they receive fines, then make sure they pay them, Johnson said.
However LCI is in the process of contracting with a collection agency to go after unpaid fees, he said.
Holmes: They Should Shovel!
Holmes then asked about another kind of LCI fine: the one for not clearing your sidewalks of snow after a storm. She said she’s never seen it enforced.
Johnson said it can take a lot of manpower to find the “owner of record” of a property and serve him with such a fine. Also, LCI is down to just one “public space inspector,” he said.
Johnson said LCI tries to accommodate people who don’t necessarily get their walks cleared, especially when the city gets hit by a record-setting blizzard like the one this winter.
“It snows. We live in Connecticut,” Holmes said. It’s important that people shovel or be forced to face the consequences, she said. She asked if the sidewalk-clearing requirement resulted in any fines at all this winter.
Johnson said he didn’t know.
“Why bother?” ask Alderwoman Jackson-Brooks. It doesn’t make sense to write tickets if the city can’t collect on them, she said.
“At LCI we don’t build our budget on ticket revenue,” Johnson said. Sometimes fines do add to the general revenue, but that’s not the agency’s purpose, he said.
“What is the purpose?” Jackson-Brooks asked.
“To ensure compliance” with housing regulations, Johnson said.
“What’s the point in having them if you can’t enforce it?” Jackson-Brooks asked.
“Part of this is a systems issue,” Johnson said. It can be hard to track down the owner of a property. If the owner never receives a fine, LCI can’t collect on it.
“We have to outsource collection,” Johnson said. The collection agency will first go after unpaid residential licensing fees, he said. It could later branch out to unpaid fines.
In some situations, LCI can put liens on properties, which the city collects on at the time of sale, Johnson said. But regular fines are still hard to collect with the staffing LCI has. You can’t put a lien on a house when the owner doesn’t clear the snow of the sidewalk, he said.
Jackson-Brooks said again that the system doesn’t make sense to her: Why write tickets at all if the city can’t collect on them? She said LCI will need to evaluate whether it’s the best use of resources to pay people to write tickets that never amount to revenue. “Some of the money from fines should go to pay our bills.”
Mike Piscitelli, deputy economic development administrator, said the collection problem is not limited to LCI. “All departments are struggling with it,” he said.
Fair Haven Alderwoman Migdalia Castro spoke up about a department that doesn’t seem to have trouble collecting. The tax collector’s office has a collection rate of upwards of 90 percent, she said.
“It’s really poor management,” she said to Johnson. She said it was “nonsense” to say it’s hard to collect fines from property owners. Send the fines with the tax bill, she said. “What is the big problem? It’s common sense.”
Before the conversation moved on, Kelly Murphy, head of economic development, said aldermen had touched on a “broader issue” of enforcement. She called it a “fruitful discussion.”