PB leaders continue to spar over blight removal by city

PINE BLUFF — Disagreements over the city’s role in building demolitions rose to the surface as three aldermen who make up Pine Bluff’s Public Health and Welfare Committee wrangled over the issue Tuesday.

Blight removal, a contentious issue in the city, recently came to a near standstill after an opinion issued by the city attorney, Althea Hadden-Scott. She called into question the legality of the city’s Urban Renewal Agency removing condemned structures within three urban renewal zones near downtown, without first acquiring ownership of those properties. It’s something that Urban Renewal Agency officials deemed prohibitively expensive.

To aid in the blight removal, the agency bought trucks and heavy equipment at a cost of $385,000 and hired two employees to operate the equipment at a cost of $82,000 annually in salaries. Since the May 20 opinion, that equipment has sat idle and the employees have been reassigned to other duties.

The heart of the opinion was that the Urban Renewal Agency, as an independent agency with an autonomous board of directors, cannot act as an agent of the city, while the city’s Code Enforcement Department, which also handles demolitions, is an agent of the city.

For that reason, Code Enforcement can raze condemned structures and then place liens on those properties to try to recover the demolition costs.

The southeast Arkansas city has identified more than 600 dilapidated structures.

Dilapidated houses, vacant lots and abandoned buildings are an issue for cities across the country. They affect public health, safety, property values and population growth, according to the National League of Cities, a Washington D.C.based organization that serves as a resource and as an advocate for more than 19,000 cities, towns and village governments across the country.

THREE PROPOSALS

Last month, Pine Bluff Mayor Shirley Washington sponsored three resolutions that would have transferred the equipment and personnel to the city’s Code Enforcement Department, and would create the position of a supervisor to oversee blight removal activities. Those resolutions, however, have yet to make it to the City Council for action.

On July 1, Washington withdrew the resolutions from consideration, citing the need to have them vetted by several committees and the need to revise at least one resolution. That came after objections were raised by several aldermen during a committee meeting just before the July 1 meeting of the City Council.

Subsequently, on July 10, the Administration Committee of the City Council rejected the proposals after aldermen Bruce Lockett and Ivan Whitfield objected to the resolutions being introduced without budget numbers.

Donald Hatchett, chairman of the city’s Public Health and Welfare Committee, described the proposal as an opportunity for the city to gain the internal capacity to raze dilapidated structures more efficiently by making use of the equipment currently housed at the Urban Renewal Agency.

Last week, the Urban Renewal Agency approved a resolution that would transfer the equipment and about $500,000 from its budget to the Code Enforcement Department to help fund blight removal activities.

“I believe we had a general opinion from the city of Pine Bluff legal staff that it is permissible for the city of Pine Bluff to engage in [blight removal],” Hatchett said.

Whitfield said even with the Urban Renewal Agency’s willingness to transfer the equipment and funds to the city, he wanted to see something in writing from the agency. But he said he still had reservations. He said that although he favored the city accepting the equipment, he opposed hiring people to operate the equipment to perform demolitions.

“I’m not crazy about the city getting into the tearing-down business, mainly because I have a police background, I look at what’s going to happen next,” Whitfield said. “We get into the tearing-down business in August, by September we’ll be in the grass-cutting business. By January, we’ll be in the hauling vehicles to a storage bin, storing our own vehicles when they have a wreck.

“This is just the first of many things to come. We have to be careful because we have many people out there who have invested in our community, and we have to give them some consideration.”

THE RAZING BUSINESS

In previous comments and interviews, Whitfield has said he does not support the city razing structures. He said razings will cut out the amount of work the city bids out to demolition contractors, and thus the jobs those contractors provide to area residents.

Lockett also continued to oppose the measure.

“I want to go on record as being opposed to the city going into the demolition business,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what cities do, and I think the current arrangement whereby we bid out the demolition of condemned structures, I think that protects us from liability and it caps our costs in terms of what we may be incurring in terms of the expense that we go into in the demolition business.”

Hatchett said the city is in the demolition business to the tune of nearly a half-million dollars’ worth of heavy equipment and two employees hired for the purpose of operating that equipment.

“We are very much in the demolition business,” he said. “The question is, what do we do now?”

Hatchett said that because the city already has the equipment sitting at the Urban Renewal Agency, it made sense to transfer the equipment to Code Enforcement and to get on with the business of razing dilapidated structures.

Jeff Gaston, director of the Code Enforcement Department, told the committee that doing so would result in greater efficiencies and lowered costs related to blight removal.

“As long as that equipment is running, instead of the process it takes of me going to bid that out, that guy can be steady going,” he said. “We just need to feed him.”

Gaston said the current backlog of blighted structures that need to be torn down is enough to justify having the internal capacity to deal with them.

Later, he said transferring the internal capacity to his office would shorten the length of time it takes to move blighted structures through the condemnation process to actually razing the structures by at least the average 30 days the bidding process adds to that procedure.

“Plus, that would get rid of us having to pay those contractors,” Gaston said. “We could keep everything in house.”

Gaston said that a possible way to speed up demolitions would be to have Code Enforcement act in a dual role, razing some structures inhouse and bidding others out to demolition contractors.

“I would love to do that,” he said. “That is something to look at because doing it that way, you can really do more. We could classify the work, maybe take the ones that are totally burnt and do them ourselves and bid the rest out to contractors.”