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Construction would be allowed as early as 7 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. if the city adopts an ordinance to be in line with county rules.
By ED QUIOCO, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 22, 2002
OLDSMAR -- City officials plan to change their rules on when construction crews can start their workdays so that Pinellas County sheriff's deputies will have an easier time ticketing workers who begin too early in the morning.
This effort comes in response to noise complaints from some neighbors who claim that workers building the Westminster apartment complex on Pine Avenue N have begun hammering away too early and are staying too late, Oldsmar Mayor Jerry Beverland said. City Council members hope to draft new rules closely mirroring the county's regulations.
"All I'm saying is we should standardize it somehow and enforce it," Beverland said.
Enforcing the ordinance would be easier if it was patterned after the county's rules because deputies would be more familiar with it, City Manager Bruce Haddock told council members.
"If it matches the county, enforcement would be simpler and easier for everybody," Haddock said. "Plus the contractors will probably tend to follow it anyway because they are already familiar with it."
Council members voted Tuesday 4-1 to authorize the city attorney to draft a proposed ordinance that would be more consistent with the county. Council member Marcelo Caruso voted against the proposal, saying he wanted to keep the city's rules unchanged.
Oldsmar code allows construction work between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. If this effort is successful, that would be changed to allow work from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays to Fridays, and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays.
Caruso said letting workers start an hour earlier would not help residents.
"If you live next to a house like that and they start staple guns at 7 a.m. and you have little kids, it just doesn't work," Caruso said.
City officials said changing the ordinance so that workers can begin work at 7 a.m. also would be more consistent with industrywide standards, officials said. Construction crews and roofers typically want to start as early as possible so they can stop work before the afternoon heat and rains.
"If you have ever worked construction, you know what it's like ... to be up there on a roof," council member David Tilki said. "You need to be on that roof at 7 in the morning and you need to be off of it as early as you can in the day, especially in the summer when you have to deal with the rains."
Changing the start times to allow workers to begin an hour earlier may sound like an odd way to respond to complaints from residents about crews starting too early, Beverland said, but it makes sense because deputies would be able to enforce the rules better.
The other way the city can try to deal with the noise complaints is through code enforcement, a complicated process that can take more than a month before it is settled.
"By that time, they have finished the job and are gone," Beverland said.
Beverland said the city is not picking on the Westminster development. City officials and the developer of the apartment complex were involved in a bitter and complicated legal battle over the project, resulting in several lawsuits before the city finally backed down.
"We are not singling out Westminster," he said. "But right now, Westminster is the only one causing the noise. If anyone thinks we are singling them out, we are not. They have singled themselves out by making all that noise."
An executive with the Wilson Co., which is developing the apartment complex, could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.
About a month ago, the city received complaints from residents about large construction trucks coming to the complex at 5 a.m. and waking up neighbors, Beverland said. City officials sent deputies out to the complex to tell workers that having trucks out there that early was in violation of the city's ordinance.
"Generally speaking, this type of thing is enforced as aggressively as the city wishes it to be," Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Marianne Pasha said. "And there is a lot of discretion left up to the deputy at the time when he or she goes out to the site."
Typically, she said, deputies would "rather work to achieve cooperation than issue citations."
The city tried changing the start times about two years ago but stopped short when council members feared that the changes would make things more complicated.
The next step is for City Attorney Tom Trask to write a draft that would change the city's current rules. Council members would then vote on whether to approve the draft as a new ordinance.
"I think we should mirror the Pinellas County ordinance," said council member Brian Michaels. "That way, everybody is on the same page."
-- Staff writer Richard Danielson contributed to this story. Ed Quioco can be reached at (727) 445-4183 or quioco@sptimes.com.