Dallas’ Code Compliance Unit Set to Change Procedures
By Rudolph Bush, The Dallas Morning News
Dec. 7–For most people in Dallas, a visit from a city Code Compliance inspector is about as welcome as a hair in the potato salad.
Other residents grouse that those same officers aren’t writing enough tickets or are writing them in all the wrong places, ignoring larger issues that trouble neighborhoods in favor of targeting smaller problems that are easier to resolve.
Code Compliance has long ranked at the top of residents’ complaints about how City Hall works in Dallas. Now, for the first time in years, the department is set to undergo a major shift in how it does business.
The hope is that Code Compliance will become more effective not only at enforcing city ordinances but at encouraging residents to take more responsibility for their property and neighborhoods.
“I’ve been here 20 years, and I think this is basically what the community has been asking for,” said Faye Williams, assistant director of the department.
Ms. Williams and interim Code Compliance director Forest Turner described the changes as a radical transformation for a department that has long focused more on how many tickets it writes than how well it solves problems.
The plan has lots of moving parts, but it boils to two major initiatives modeled on the Police Department’s beat officer and substation programs.
— First, by April 1, most code officers, managers and laborers will no longer work all over the city from central locations. Instead, they will move into offices in five geographic regions around Dallas. From those offices, they will be responsible for neighborhoods within their regions.
— Second, the department will create a new position, known as a neighborhood code representative. Each of the city’s five regions will have three representatives. And instead of focusing on writing tickets, their job will be to get to know residents and neighborhood leaders. As they learn about specific problems that plague a neighborhood, they will involve the city department best suited to address them, Mr. Turner said.
“We feel like this is the fundamental change we are going to make in this department,” he said. “We still have available in an area these code officers to show up and write a citation. … Now we’re also going to have a person who can go out and educate, [asking] did you know you are in violation.”
For City Council members who listened to an avalanche of complaints about Code Compliance at town hall meetings earlier this year, the changes can’t come soon enough.
“I’m cautiously optimistic. I think that we as a city needed a revised strategy and leadership in Code,” council member Dave Neumann said.
Mr. Neumann’s careful endorsement is shared by many of his colleagues, particularly council veterans who have seen firsthand the difficulty of righting a department that has long struggled with low morale, racial strife and high turnover.
“It’s not responsive enough to residents. It does not resolve issues quickly enough,” council member Angela Hunt said. “There is a sense that code inspectors focus on low-hanging fruit rather than addressing substantive problems.”
Mr. Turner agreed those are key concerns and said he hopes they will begin to be addressed by changing the department’s structure.
As recently as summer 2006, Code Compliance faced a backlog of about 400 unresolved complaints.
That number was down to 139 Thursday, Ms. Williams said.
As code inspectors are assigned to specific neighborhoods, they should develop a better sense of ownership for the problems, Mr. Turner said.
The neighborhood representatives, meanwhile, will file reports on problems in their areas with the hope that the department will become less dependent on the 311 system to identify complaints, he said.
“We want them to be proactive, to tell us about things before anybody calls in,” he said.
City Manager Mary Suhm said it was critical that the department’s failings be addressed, but she cautioned that no one should expect all code enforcement problems to disappear.
“You don’t fix Code. You have to pay attention to Code all the time,” she said.
Employees fired
That was aptly demonstrated in 2004, when the city fired, suspended or reprimanded more than 60 code compliance employees for lying about how much work they were actually performing. It stands as the largest single disciplinary action in recent city history.
By 2005, about two-thirds of those employees had returned to work, with many fired employees reinstated through the city’s civil service appeals process. Some received thousands of dollars in back pay.
For now, the city is getting a glimpse of how things might work come April.
In the impoverished Frazier/Dolphin Heights neighborhood near Fair Park, 10-year Code Compliance veteran Connie Reese has been knocking on doors as part of a pilot program to better connect people with the department.
She doesn’t wear a uniform, and she doesn’t write tickets. Instead, she asks people such as 91-year-old Elizabeth Kirvin how the city can help them.
Since the 1940s, Ms. Kirvin has lived in her small home on Metropolitan Avenue. When the grass and weeds began to get out of control in a lot along the fence line of her home, there was little she could do about it.
After Ms. Reese arranged for the weeds to be cut, she developed a relationship with Ms. Kirvin that involves stopping in to chat every so often.
Not far from Ms. Kirvin’s home, Don Williams and George Bonner sat on a porch overlooking boarded-up houses and a vacant lot.
Their neighborhood gets a lot of visits from Code Compliance because of the high number of abandoned houses, overgrown lots and piles of junk along the sidewalks.
The visits usually aren’t welcome, but people on the street have come to like Ms. Reese, Mr. Bonner said.
“Some people will come by and say you’ve got to move this or do that. She says it, but she just says it in a nice way,” he said.
Tightening ordinances
While leaders in Code Compliance are hoping to present a friendlier face to the public, they also are investigating ways to tighten ordinances that affect everyday life in the city.
The plans are preliminary, but the department is looking at ordinances governing high weeds, signs that clutter convenience store windows and the number of pets allowed per household.
Code officers also are going to receive training to recognize less common violations that occur in the city’s growing number of historic, conservation and planned development districts, Mr. Turner said.
As inspectors and neighborhood representatives begin to tackle bigger neighborhood problems, code leaders want to see more prosecutions go to court.
The city attorney’s office is in the process of adding a lawyer to focus on code prosecutions. Also, community prosecutors are beginning to handle code cases as well, First Assistant City Attorney Chris Bowers said.
Mr. Turner hopes that with a fresh focus, his department will begin to turn around its reputation at City Hall and in the neighborhoods of Dallas.
“I feel like the 400-some employees that are here doing the work — in some cases risking their safety — I want to make a department that supports them. If I can do that, they will deliver,” he said.
REVAMPING CODE COMPLIANCE
THE PROBLEM:
A Code Compliance department judged bureaucratic, unresponsive and incapable of tackling major problems that plague neighborhoods.
THE RESPONSE:
— Move most code inspectors to offices in five regions of the city.
— Create new “neighborhood code representatives” who can reach out to residents and resolve more complicated neighborhood problems.
— Train inspectors to recognize less common code violations in the city’s growing number of historic, conservation and planned development districts.
— Consider tightening ordinances that govern high weeds, pets per household and signs in storefront windows.
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