Jenkins renews call for enforcer

By Allison Brophy Champion

Published: July 20, 2008

Overgrown lawns. Trash cans left on town sidewalks for days. A house sprayed with graffiti. A car with no license plates parked on the front lawn. Multiple individuals and families living together in single family homes.

Culpeper Town Councilman Steve Jenkins is tired of it all and wants the town to create a new zoning enforcer position to deal with what he perceives as unsightly and unsafe situations.

However, he doesn’t appear to have much support from the rest of Town Council, including Mayor Pranas Rimeikis, who feels council has already adequately addressed the issue at the committee level.

He said there are not enough violations to warrant the cost of an enforcement officer.

“Secondly, Steve does not understand what’s in violation and what can be enforced,” Rimeikis said. “How do you enforce against unsightly? It’s hard to legislate eye sores until you can define it.”

Perhaps Jenkins should define what’s unsightly and then let council decide if it wants to — or can — create ordinances against it, he said.

“Typically, he’s off pushing a solution to a problem we may not have,” Rimeikis said.

Jenkins has pushed for the zoning enforcer position for the past two years and it’s been discussed at numerous committee meetings.

Town staff has consistently said it has zoning complaints under control and that the new position is not needed.

But Jenkins is not letting the issue die, and wants to know why there are ordinances if they are not going to be enforced?

Last week, he stopped by the Star-Exponent with a stack of pictures he recently snapped of areas around town he deemed as problematic.

Jenkins, who grew up in the town, attributed the unkempt yards and such, mostly, to absentee landlords.

He described the living conditions, in some cases, as “unfit” and detrimental to neighbors, especially in reported cases of “seven, eight, nine people” returning to live in a single-family house late at night.

“If you had a zoning enforcement position, they would be responsible for dealing with this,” Jenkins said, adding that the new, full-time position would pay for itself in positive change.

Currently, the town’s zoning administrator investigates property complaints with follow-up phone calls and on-site visits.

The town received 40 such complaints in June, according to a report compiled by Zoning Administrator Maxie Brown.

Of those, 30 were for tall grass and trash in the yard.

Since January, her office has received 13 reports of “too many people in a residence.”

Most were considered “resolved” once the property owner signed a sworn affidavit that everyone living in the house was, in fact, related and therefore, not in violation of the town’s zoning ordinance.

Such overcrowded conditions exist in the Sleepy Hollow Trailer Park on Bus. 29 and elsewhere, Jenkins said, and it’s “a nightmare waiting to happen.”

He said the proposed zoning enforcer could “take it to the next step” as far as investigating the validity of sworn affidavits.

He said neighbors have “given up” calling the town with overcrowding complaints “because nothing ever changes.”

Several candidates in the recent Town Council election that had aligned themselves with Jenkins on this and other immigrant-related topics ran on this issue. None won a seat.

Still, Jenkins wants the town to “more aggressively” investigate and enforce residential zoning complaints. The law should apply to all, he said.

“It bothers me that other taxpayers are following the ordinances and these people are not,” Jenkins said.

What if everyone decided to disregard the ordinances?

“We would have a town filled with trash,” he said. “If we are going to have an ordinance, enforce them all or throw them all out.”

Mowing the lawn and picking up trash from the yard is just “normal common sense courtesy,” Jenkins said.

Town Councilman Chris Snider, reelected with the most votes in May’s election, has supported creating the zoning enforcer position in the past.

But now, it’s a matter of funding it.

“If Councilman Jenkins can find an extra $40,000 in the budget, I’m sure council will consider his request to add a zoning enforcement officer position and thus further grow the size of local government,” Snider wrote in an e-mail Friday.

According to Acting Town Manager Tom Huggard, the issue, at Jenkins’ request, was discussed at last month’s Ordinance Committee meeting.

The committee took no action on the item and did not make a recommendation to full council on the matter.

Allison Brophy Champion can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 101 or .