| County
aims to boost code violation enforcement
D.A.'s
Office will direct funds toward complaints in unincorporated areas
including Lennox and Del Aire.
By
Alison Shackelford - Copley News Service, December 1, 2004
A
car parked on a front lawn. People living in an
illegally converted garage. Graffiti on
the side of an abandoned house.
These
and other misdemeanor code violations -- hot-button issues for residents
of Lennox, El Camino Village, Del Aire and other unincorporated
communities -- soon will get more attention from the District Attorney's
Office, which received $500,000 from the county Board of Supervisors
on Tuesday for a seven-person code-enforcement team.
The
team will investigate and prosecute cases stemming from complaints
about everything from loud parties and bothersome neighborhood pets
to trash-filled yards and home-based businesses in areas that are
zoned exclusively residential. Illegal dumping, building without
a permit and myriad other crimes -- most of them property-related
-- also will fall under the unit's jurisdiction.
"It's
basically the kinds of things that really bug your neighbors,"
said David Janssen, the county's chief administrative officer, whose
department met with the District Attorney's Office to develop the
proposal.
Funding
for the code-enforcement team comes as part of a $5 million package
the supervisors approved Tuesday that will pay for 45 new prosecutors
for the District Attorney's Office, which has suffered significant
funding cuts in recent years. The supervisors wanted to make sure
that unincorporated areas would benefit from hiring the new investigators,
and required that the code-enforcement team -- lost as part of the
budget trimming -- be revived.
Supervisor
Don Knabe said the code-enforcement unit
will help the county crack down on illegal activity in residential
neighborhoods.
"We
have significant issues in the unincorporated pockets, where we
find these code violations but we don't have the dedicated D.A.'s,"
Knabe said. "(The cases) get put
on the back burner and nothing really happens, which is tough on
the neighborhoods."
Supervisor
Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said she hears
frequent complaints about quality-of-life code violations, particularly
in Lennox.
"If
people are concerned about someone doing something and they call,
you have to have an enforcement mechanism to really stop people,"
Burke said.
Julie Vogel, secretary of the Del Aire Neighborhood
Association, said she frequently hears complaints at association
meetings about code violations.
"It
would be nice to have a go-to person ... to ask questions,"
she said, noting that many people, herself
included, aren't sure where to report those kinds of problems.
The
new code-enforcement team will be supported by a similar group already
based in the County
Counsel's Office, which will use notices
and fines in preliminary attempts to get property owners and others
to comply with the law. When those efforts don't work, the county
counsel will direct cases to the district attorney for criminal
filing.
A
new fee system expected to be approved by the supervisors in January
would create heftier, more uniform fines to be imposed by the County Counsel's
Office for code violations. The fines would range from $100 to $1,000, a level that District Attorney Steve Cooley predicted
will help discourage people from violating county codes in the first
place.
Copley
News Service Correspondent David Zahniser contributed to this article.
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