Delray Beach’s new neighborhood services director outlines push for community engagement, softer code enforcement

Jerry Pryor, Delray Beach’s new director of Neighborhood and Community Services, told the Village Vibes podcast that his immediate priorities are more visible community engagement, staff retention and reframing code enforcement as a supportive, not punitive, function.

Pryor, who retired from a city role in Fort Lauderdale before joining Delray Beach, said his department covers several divisions including Clean and Safe, sanitation (including the city’s contract with Waste Management), neighborhood support, housing and community development. “You can’t have community engagement from behind a desk,” Pryor said, arguing the city needs staff in neighborhoods and at local meetings to build trust and participation.

The core of Pryor’s message is to make neighborhood services a partner in local problem-solving and to expand small-scale volunteer events. He described programs already in place — the Adopt a Street volunteer cleanup, a quarterly Shred Day run with Waste Management, and school-centered activities such as a recent “touch-a-truck” event hosted by the sanitation crew — and said he wants more neighborhood-level events tailored to local needs.

Pryor gave a concrete example of a recent operational change driven by resident feedback: the department’s door hanger notices. “The intent was to educate, be proactive, but then, in my purview, it turned out to be punitive and not educational,” he said. After hearing residents’ concerns, Pryor said staff removed the automatic assignment of a code case to those hangers so the notice now serves as an educational outreach rather than the start of enforcement. “We changed it because of you,” he told community members who raised the issue.

He also stressed internal goals for the department, including reducing staff turnover and building institutional knowledge so residents “know who to call” and the department can pursue and export best practices. Pryor said he wants Delray Beach to be a model that other cities call to learn from, particularly for the Clean and Safe program and neighborhood engagement tactics.

Pryor framed the department’s work as a mix of direct services and relationship-building: coordinating volunteers, helping elderly residents with property upkeep, supporting homeowners’ associations and ensuring sanitation processes are both efficient and accessible. He said some limits are set by law and policy, and that where statutory requirements apply the department must follow them, but for many outreach and procedural choices there is room to adjust based on community input.

Pryor said he has been on the job for two months and intends to attend neighborhood and homeowners’ meetings to solicit feedback. He described his approach as collaborative and pragmatic: identify where the city can remove barriers, involve residents in solutions and celebrate improvements that follow from that engagement.

The interview did not include specific budgets, ordinance citations or timelines for larger policy changes; Pryor used examples of recent program and process changes to illustrate his priorities and asked residents and neighborhood groups to participate in shaping future efforts.