Standing room only at the city’s second BlightStat meeting
Judging from the standing-room-only meeting space for the second New Orleans “BlightStat” meeting, public interest in the city’s new statistics-driven performance management process to reduce blight is overwhelming.
As a metric of the success of the effort to have NolaStat recommendations implemented by the Landrieu administration, the packed BlightStat meeting suggests that the message has been received and approved.
Future meetings should be held in a space that can better accommodate a large public audience. Alternatively, department officials might squeeze around a smaller table to allow for more rows of chairs. City Council chambers would be a better venue, in particular because the Council made an investment in what could be the best technology implementation by the city — Granicus streaming video, archived with searchable meeting agendas, so that the public can monitor meetings remotely and at their convenience.
Most of the meeting time was dedicated to discussions focused on how effectively Code Enforcement inspectors were able to convert numbers of citizen complaint calls into numbers of inspected properties, the outcome of Code Enforcement judgments against negligent property owners, and a targeted sweep to identify blighted properties around Bunny Friend playground.
The fact that 55 percent of hundreds of property complaints hadn’t been been inspected within fifteen days over a six-week period only calls attention to the fact that — as most of us already know — there aren’t enough inspectors to handle the tens of thousands of blighted properties in the city.
On the other hand, the fact that 58 percent of 534 properties, over the same October 1st to November 12th period, were “reset” — giving the negligent owner more time to remediate problems — is more an indication of the ineffectiveness of the enforcement process, of which citizens have complained for years. Facing judgments against them which may include fines of $100 per day, negligent owners have been allowed to reset their hearings to future dates after showing minimal effort to remediate. Noting this cycle of abuse, Mid-City Neighborhood Association representative Jennifer Weishaupt suggested a judgment of “conditional guilty” to flag repeat offenders. The high number of reset hearings only adds additional burden upon code enforcement officials who have to reconsider the same properties over and over again.
Three additional key metrics that the city might consider tracking are the number of resets by address, the time lapsed since the first complaint was filed against an address, and the total sum of all fines collected for blighted properties. The latter isn’t a desirable statistic, and presumably it will go down as the enforcement mechanism grows some teeth. Nevertheless, at least for an interim period, measuring fines will be an indication of how much pain is being inflicted upon particularly negligent owners, to get them into compliance with neighbors’ desires, and city code.
Obviously, the city may want to exercise some caution — and should work closely with neighborhood associations to ensure that pain isn’t afflicted unnecessarily upon honest property owners who truly just need assistance rebuilding damaged homes.
Finally, a remark made by CAO Andy Kopplin merits attention. A question was raised by an audience member about the fact that Louisiana Land Trust personnel have been very helpful in responding to citizen concerns about blight, but she complained that the responsiveness vanishes once those properties are transferred to other entities. In keeping with the NolaStat inter-agency coordination model, Kopplin courteously pointed out that other agencies were present in the BlightStat meeting room precisely for that reason: That better coordination has been lacking for years. Also consistent with the process-oriented movement toward the achievement of goals, Kopplin noted that the reason for tracking metrics is to make sure that targets to reduce blight are achieved.
I couldn’t agree more.
Special complements are deserved of CAO staff members Gloria Journee and Jocelyn Christopher for their responsiveness to requests for additional chairs and handouts at the BlightStat meeting. They went beyond any mandate for a service-friendly City Hall, demonstrating extraordinary grace, civility, and kindness to fellow citizens.
Thanks to Charlie London for compiling detailed and accurate meeting notes for the Faubourg-St. John Neighborhood Association. They were helpful in recalling some of the points of discussion.
