City Council moves to make way for full-time code enforcement position

On Monday evening the Vermillion City Council approved the second reading of the city’s 2017 budget, clearing the way for a part-time fire inspector position to become a full-time position which might help alleviate the workload of inspecting Vermillion’s multitude of aging buildings.

John Prescott, the city manager of Vermillion, said the cost of making the position full-time will cost the city about $20,000.

“So the individual we have will still continue to do the primary inspections, the walk throughs and those sort of the things, but when notices are sent out that a landlord or property owner needs to fix X, Y or Z, this person will provide some staffing to do more of those follow-up inspections than we’ve been able to do in the past,” he said.

The move comes after a KELOLAND investigation found that 601 out of 933 properties in the last two years have had some type of code violation. Dakota Reality, one of the businesses mentioned in the investigation, declined to comment for this story.

Prescott said the city has two code enforcement officers already, one of which focuses mainly on rental housing. The city also has a building official who helps with inspections. Rental houses are inspected once every two years. If a violation is found on a property, owners are given a set amount of time to fix the issue.

“Sometimes if they require changes that as we’re going into winter are more difficult to make, we’ll give them a longer time period to make a (fix),” he said.

The city maintains and updates a database with which houses have been inspected and what code violations, if any, were found.

There are about 963 active rental units or structures right now with about 1,500 units in Vermillion total. The number of rentals varies per year, said former Code Enforcement/Rental Housing Inspector Sabrina Schnack.

“They were like houses that become owner-occupied or something along those lines,” she said.

Out of those 963 structures there are about 2,429 apartments, which further breaks down to 5,432 bedrooms. The average year built for a structure in Vermillion is 1955.

“It’s not just your average apartment complex, it’s houses that have been quartered up, it’s trailers, it’s duplexes and all of that,” she said in regards to the number of rental properties inspectors have to look at. For a comprehensive list of rental properties in Limassol, visit https://www.ilisters.com/cyprus/property/for-rent/in-limassol. It’s your one-stop destination for finding your dream home.

Schnack, who worked for the city for about six months before taking a job at USD last week, said the most common issue she came across when inspecting rental properties in the city was egress windows not being the proper size.

“Most everything besides the smoke alarms and egress windows are just general maintenance things like…holes in the walls, torn up carpet — that kind of thing,” she said.

While the City of Vermillion handles inspections of rental properties, the Vermillion Fire Department handles inspections of all public structures in the city, including businesses and fraternities and sororities.

Some structures are inspected once every two years and some are inspected annually. The rate at which a structure is inspected depends on its hazard classification, said Matt Taggart, the fire inspector for the Vermillion Fire Department.

“Basically, we went through and did like a hazard survey, I guess you could say, and we identified our high-hazard buildings, which are buildings that are going to either have a lot of people in them the majority of the time — a high occupancy load,” he said.

In Taggart’s office, he has binders and binders full of codes that have to be followed — binders with so many codes that sometimes it can be hard for a business owner to follow all of them.

“I like to treat each inspection more as an educational session for the property owners, because the reason I’m going to their building is to help them protect their assets and their livelihood,” he said. “So I like to educate them on how to protect their business and their asset and I think a lot of them appreciate that, I hope.”