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Workshop trims vacant-building rules, sets fee cadence and tightens lien language
Summary
At a July 11 workshop, councilors and staff advanced edits to the nuisance ordinance’s vacant-building provisions: they agreed to make vacancy a 2-year long-term threshold, move fee amounts to the city fee schedule and require staff to reconcile lien/abatement language for collection procedures.
A city/county workshop on July 11 continued revisions of the nuisance ordinance, with participants focusing on vacant buildings, fees and how the city would recover abatement costs.
The most immediate changes agreed to were procedural. After debate, the group directed staff to change the draft’s long-term vacancy threshold from five years to two years so properties vacant and boarded or without utilities for two years could be treated as long-term vacant. Speaker 6 summarized the shift toward consistency: “So we’re gonna change the 3 years to 2,” and the group confirmed the shorter threshold by consensus. Staff were asked to change all cross-references in the ordinance to match.
Why it matters: shorter vacancy thresholds let the city move more quickly to abatement, posting and enforcement for properties that depress neighboring property values and present health, safety or economic harms. Several participants urged explicitly adding “economic” to the chronic-nuisance purpose so that reduced property values and lost economic activity are covered.
Key procedural and fiscal decisions: participants endorsed moving fee amounts and interest/penalty rates out of the ordinance text and into the city fee schedule, which staff can update administratively. A majority favored changing the vacant-building fee from an annual charge to quarterly billing to make nonpayment more visible and easier to manage; as one participant put it during the discussion, “So let’s do quarterly.” Staff (referenced in the meeting as Wes) was asked to reconcile any remaining references to “annual” in the draft and the fee schedule.
Liens and enforcement: the draft permits placing a lien to recover abatement costs; workshop discussion focused on how liens would be recorded and collected. Staff clarified that recording a lien is typically followed by court processes to foreclose or collect, and that municipal procedure differs from county procedure. Speaker 1 summarized the enforcement trade-off: recording a lien will “tie up” property until the lien is cleared, but it remains one of the city’s practical tools to recover costs or compel compliance.
Other technical edits: the group recommended standardizing the use of discretionary language (changing several instances of “shall” to “may” where the city manager’s discretion is intended), clarifying notification timeframes for corrective actions, and consolidating interest and penalty rates on the fee schedule rather than fixing them in code.
Next steps: staff will update the nuisance ordinance draft to reflect the two-year long-term vacancy threshold, move fee amounts to the fee schedule, standardize ‘‘may/shall’’ language for administrator discretion, and return the revised draft for review before public publication.
The workshop closed with staff directions and no formal vote recorded.
