Pinellas Park man wants sign law upheld

All those "earn money at home'' and "we buy houses'' signs are illegal, he says, and the city isn't enforcing its own laws.

By ANNE LINDBERG

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 10, 2001

PINELLAS PARK -- Al Essex really hates to see signs dotting the landscape.

You know the ones: insurance signs, "work at home" signs, "we buy homes" signs illegally stuck in roadside rights of way and dangling on telephone poles.

Essex hates the sign pollution so much that he has become a familiar sight at City Council meetings complaining that Pinellas Park's code officers regularly fail to remove the signs. He has accused officers of driving right past the illegal signs without stopping to pull them down.

He complained so much that then-police Chief David Milchan appointed him as a volunteer in charge of removing signs. Essex later resigned after officials told him not to interact with residents while taking down the signs, Milchan said.

Essex, 56, has been known "many, many times" to follow code enforcement officers on their rounds, keeping track of things they miss.

"I've been telling them for years they need glasses," Essex said.

Now he's even more convinced that's the case after he recently followed a Pinellas Park code officer up 66th Street N.

Essex says it happened this way: Code officer Bob Hatzmann (Essex got his license number) passed him as both were driving north on 66th. That happened at about the intersection with 82nd Avenue, where there was an illegal sign. Hatzmann passed it without stopping.

Essex kept following as the code officer drove north and passed another sign at 102nd Avenue N and a third at 118th Avenue N.

"Those were all work at home signs, insurance signs, we buy home signs," Essex said. "None of those were garage sale signs," which the city lets stand until after the sale is over.

Essex added, "He never looked at the signs at all."

Soon both Essex and the code officer were outside the city limits. Finally, the officer pulled into the Dunkin' Donuts at 13013 66th St. N, just south of Ulmerton Road.

It was 11:26 a.m., Essex said.

Essex said he himself removed the signs later in the day. And at about 2 a.m. on June 2, Essex pulled down 44 other signs.

"They say they don't want residents taking down signs, but code enforcement won't do it," Essex said. "As far as I can see, code enforcement does nothing."

Pinellas Park police Capt. Mike Haworth, who oversees code enforcement, said that conclusion is untrue and unfair. Essex and others who complain about code enforcement's failures need to take a look at the big picture, he said.

First, the department is severely understaffed at present. Normally an eight-person force, retirements and departures have reduced the code force to five and one of those officers is on temporary military leave. That leaves four code officers to handle complaints for a city of about 45,000.

With all that, Haworth said, the issue becomes one of priorities. Right now, the department is receiving 50 to 60 calls daily about people violating water restrictions. On top of those calls, code officers are dealing with chronic complaints about other issues, such as a homeowner who has a rat-infested house.

"There are some huge things going on in the city that we're trying to take care of," Haworth said.

As for the doughnut shop incident, Haworth said Hatzmann is in no trouble even if he took the car outside the city limits. The Dunkin' Donuts inside the Pinellas Park limits is closed for renovations, Haworth said, so that explained why Hatzmann left the city.

"He said he went and got a coffee and it probably would have been right around his meal break hour. That wouldn't have been a problem," Haworth said.

If he was on a meal break, then the officer was not required to stop to take down the signs, Haworth said. It's true, he could have removed them later, but it could be that he had more pressing code issues to deal with at the time.

"With Mr. Essex it's a problem. But are they doing their job? Of course they're doing their job," Haworth said.

"There's just so many hours in the day and you can only get to so many (of them). . . . Mr. Essex finds that extremely egregious, but without looking at the totality of the whole thing, it's hard to say if it was."

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