Jefferson County plans to clean blighted lots and add expenses to owners’ tax bills

In the last two years Jefferson County has taken at least a half dozen local property owners to Magistrate Court in a effort to get them to clean up their blighted properties. Even when jail time is a very real threat, often the issues on those properties never really get addressed, said County Administrator Jerry Coalson.

During its September meeting the county held the first reading of a change to an ordinance that if passed in October will, as Chairman Mitchell McGraw said, give it “some teeth.”

County Attorney Dalton Dowdy told the board that the changes dovetail with the county’s existing unfit housing ordinance.

“In the past we have only been able to take action if the structure was unfit,” Dowdy said. Adding the new language into the ordinance, he said, will allow the county to notify a property owner “if they have a junk car or trash in the yard or if the grass was waist high or taller, and if they didn’t clean it up in the specified time at that point the county could clean it up at the county’s expense and the county could then put that cost on the owner of the lot’s property tax bill.”

Dowdy said that he is aware of a number of other jurisdictions who do this and added that state law provides for this option.

“It would be just another tool in the arsenal that our code enforcement crowd would have to be able to deal with some of these blighted properties,” Dowdy told the commissioners.

Coalson later said that while the county is aware of a number properties that would technically qualify as blighted, he expects the county to go after “the most egregious offenders first.”

He mentioned properties where junk and broken down vehicles are plainly visible from the road and are driving down surrounding property values and other properties where the accumulated trash has become a health issue, providing a breeding ground for snakes, rats and other vermin. Those are the types of properties he expects to address first.

Coalson mentioned one property on the north end of the county that has refrigerator and air conditioner parts all over the yard.

“They’ve tried to clean it up and tried to clean it up. It has gotten to the point where people just bring more stuff and dump it on his property,” Coalson said. “He has gotten to the point now where he physically can’t do it himself....It's never going to get done.”

In some of these situations, Coalson said, the property owner simply does not have the capability of handling a situation that has gotten out of their control.

“The judge can do anything in the world with these people, even put them in jail, but at the end of the day there is no mechanism to actually go clean up the property,” Coalson said. “There are some who are sick, older folks, and that’s not the place for them.  We’re looking at it like a toolbox. We have things in the toolbox to take care of problems.”

The new version of the ordinance will give them the tools they need to actually address the problem, Coalson said.

The county will likely use inmate labor, list out the costs the county incurs from the cleanup, and then have those expense added to the property owner’s tax bill as a fee.

“I think this is some thing we have needed for a long time,” McGraw said, later adding, “I highly recommend the board approve this and we move forward as soon as possible.”

The motion to proceed was made by Commissioner Johnny Davis, seconded by Commissioner Gonice Davis and passed unanimously. The second reading is expected to be heard at the county’s next meeting Monday, Oct. 7.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Jefferson County plans to clean blighted lots and add expenses to owners’ tax bills