O’Shea wants notifications of violations sent within 45 days
Inspector General Joe Ferguson has accused the city’s law department of blindsiding homeowners and businesses and forfeiting revenue by allowing too much time to pass between the time a sanitation code violation is committed and citations are issued.
Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th) thinks he has an answer to the bureaucratic bungling that has allowed overflowing dumpsters and weed-filled lots to pile up.
At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, O’Shea plans to introduce an ordinance requiring notices of violation to be served no more than
45 days after the date the violation is committed. That’s everything from overflowing garbage dumpsters to overgrown weeds.
If homeowners and business owners are not served within that 45-day window, the ticket would be non-suited.
“The city would light a fire under itself. Process these tickets. Get ’em to the property owner so the property owner can start cutting the weeds or being a good neighbor. And then, we can curb the bad behavior, and people’s quality of life won’t be adversely affected,” O’Shea said Tuesday.
“A Streets and Sanitation ticket is written and, in many cases, it was taking eight months, nine months, ten months for the property owner to receive the ticket. We need to get these things out in a timely manner . . . so we can avoid these problems in so many communities.”
O’Shea said he doesn’t care who is responsible for the fact that 87% of the 101,729 code violations issued over a two-year period were sent to property owners at least six months after the violation was committed.
“We need revenue,” he said. “The city needs to do a better job of processing these things. There’s no excuse. No other big city has anywhere near the backlog we’ve had in the last several years.”