Give Fire Safety Enforcement to Firefighters

 

            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