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Violate city codes? Foreclosure likely

"We mean business, and we will take your property," the city's director of code enforcement says.

By JANET ZINK
Published November 14, 2005

TAMPA - For the first time in seven years, city officials have started foreclosing on properties whose owners repeatedly violate city codes.

Last week, the city targeted two offenders.

"We mean business, and we will take your property," said Curtis Lane, the city's director of code enforcement.

The owner of one property, at 1306 E North Bay St. in Seminole Heights, has racked up more than $165,000 in unpaid fines for code violations since 1999, said Jorge Martin, assistant city attorney.

Owner Rutuchadavan Romeo, who lives across the street from the vacant lot, has been cited for such violations as parking nonworking cars on the site and overgrowth of weeds and brush.

"Basically, they use it to store trash," Martin said. "It's been an ongoing problem."

The lot - worth about $24,675, the Hillsborough County property appraiser said - is surrounded by modest bungalow-style homes with tidy lawns.

Romeo could not be reached for comment.

Stan Lasater, a Seminole Heights resident and outspoken critic of the city's code enforcement activities, said the North Bay Street property is a good candidate for foreclosure.

"Everyone knows the place," he said. "It's literally like a landfill."

But he's skeptical the city will fulfill its promise to foreclose on 15 properties a month.

"I'll believe it when I see it," he said. "I applaud the effort for the first step. However, I want to wait and see what happens next. If the city forecloses and they have it by the end of December, then I'll consider it a great success." The other property the city is targeting is on Poinsettia Avenue near Fowler and Nebraska avenues.

Lasater, who worries that poorly maintained vacant lots and homes will bring down his property values, said Martin has been telling him since March that the city was going to start foreclosures any day.

An outside law firm had handled the city's foreclosures. But none has been done since 1999, and in Dick Greco's eight years as mayor, the most done per year was two or three, Martin said.

He gave two explanations for this: The city was accumulating too many properties and having a hard time reselling them, and court costs were too high. Mayor Pam Iorio began talking in October 2004 about reinstating the program for frequent code violators. In February, she issued an executive order authorizing foreclosures, and the city's code enforcement department forwarded dozens of potential candidates to the legal department.

In April, the City Council voted to give Martin's department $50,000 to start foreclosures. But the money was never spent. Martin said he'll go back to the council in a few weeks and ask for $150,000 to pay for title searches and filing fees for foreclosures.

The proceedings were delayed while files were moved to another office, he said, and he could hire a full-time paralegal to help with the task.

Picking properties to pursue is time-consuming, he said.

State law prohibits city officials from taking owner-occupied properties. They can only take rental, investment and commercial properties. And the city wants to take only properties it can use or sell and that don't have environmental problems.

"There are a whole bunch of benchmarks that we look at before saying, "Okay, this one's good to go,"' Martin said. "We don't want properties we can't do anything with but maintain."

The ultimate goal, though, is not to stockpile a bunch of land, said Lane, the code enforcement director.

Officials just want people to take care of their property.

"Compliance is the key," he said. "Foreclosures are another tool that we have in our arsenal."

Without pursuing foreclosures, the city has little recourse against people who continually violate city codes and don't pay their fines, he said. "We're not trying to frighten people who can't do any better because of hard times."

The foreclosures are part of Iorio's efforts to step up code enforcement activities.

Since taking office in early 2003, she has created the code enforcement department, ordered code enforcement sweeps of neighborhoods and organized cleanups. The code enforcement department has put inspectors to work on weekends, when commercial vehicles are likely to be parked in residential areas in violation of city code.

All that activity has sent a strong message to violators, which has helped boost fine collections, Martin said.

The city collected $402,808 in fines during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, up from $196,955 in the previous year.

Still, not everyone is impressed.

Some City Council members say constituents call with complaints about code violations more than any other issue.

At Thursday's council meeting, member Mary Alvarez asked that code enforcement officials brief the council quarterly on their activities.

Santiago Corrada, the city's neighborhood services administrator, said code enforcement complaints go both ways. The department gets inundated with calls from people complaining that code enforcement is too heavy-handed, he said.

Nonetheless, Alvarez wants to know what kind of citations are being issued and how quickly they're processed.

"They say there's a lot of improvements, but I don't see that much," Alvarez said in an interview Friday. "If there are results, then I want to know about it. That's why I asked for quarterly reports."

Alvarez and council member Rose Ferlita want to know why the city more than a year ago spent $1-million on a computer system that's supposed to help code enforcement investigators identify repeat offenders but hasn't implemented the program.

The city signed the contract for the system in October 2002, but the system is not expected to be fully functional until 2008.

Ferlita, who during her first term on the council launched the "Rose Patrol" to personally direct code enforcement efforts, said she's glad to see the city start foreclosures.

"But it's sure not a very big start," she said. "At this point, we should have done more. I guarantee you there are more than two sites out there that we could have foreclosed on."

She has questions about the increased fine collections, which is one reason she supported Alvarez's request for quarterly reports.

"If someone has a building that's an eyesore and we're collecting fines because someone has blades of grass that are a little higher than they're supposed to be, then we're not focusing on the right violations," she said. "I'd rather get the awful things out of the way first."

[Last modified November 14, 2005, 01:03:13]