Before 2006, we had
firemen going around town in May, telling people to cut their grass for fire
season. We also called the Fire
Department to complain about uncut properties.
City Manager David Frasher and the Council joined fire and police into
“Public Safety” and stopped them from enforcing city codes. They gave that job to Code Enforcement, soon
called “Community Service,” and they enforced codes thereafter only from citizen
complaints.
Manager Frasher taught Community Service not to enforce
property maintenance codes until the nuisance was so bad that the city could
abate it, at 10% over cost. He was hired
by a Council of mostly builders and bankers.
Over
two elections, voters elected other small business owners, who fired Frasher. Those five councilors were soon recalled by city
staff and their friends, egged on by Mayor Murphy, who then appointed 5
Councilors on his own non-existent authority.
That
Council or the next hired Manager Cubic.
When I complained that the 10% abatement fee rewarded the City for not enforcing
codes sooner and was a conflict of interest, he raised the fee to 20% and
continued to harvest health and safety hazards as they got ripe.
This year, the City left two Community Service Officer
positions unfilled to help balance the budget, so there aren’t enough CSOs to
investigate all complaints. Noxious grasses
and weeds, mostly with burrs and stickers, have taken over dry lawns and other neglected
areas and too many have not been cut as fire season begins. Manager Cubic said
on KAJO the other day that Council sets the level of service, and we don’t have
enough police to police properties.
Does this Council want to save our city from wildfire and
make this city more inviting? Now that
we have again separated fire and police services, you need to give active
enforcement of property nuisance codes back to the fire department. They have a strong incentive to do a good job
at it, and they have enough time between fighting fires, which is why they used
to do it in the first place.
But to help people maintain their properties fire safe, we
need to return our water rates to the rate system that for 50 years allowed
everyone to fully water their yards: paying all overhead with base rates and
only marginal unit costs with unit prices.
Then we can all grow good green perennial lawns, flowers, food, and
shrubs, rather than noxious fire-hazard brambles, grasses and weeds, full of
stickers and burrs.
(Correction: The Courier called me and said that Manager Cubic was consistent in saying that Police and Fire were joined in Public Safety in 1986. Police and Fire were forbidden to enforce city code around 2006 and Code Enforcement/Community Service were given the job.)
Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 6-1-22 and the Josephine
County Commissioners 6-15-22
published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.
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Rycke
Brown, Natural Gardener 541-955-9040 rycke@gardener.com
