Though operated by one of the smallest staffs within local governmental departments, code enforcement for both Durango and La Plata County is one of the busiest, most varied and difficult jobs to gauge in terms of efficiency.
As a sort of backup force for police, the job is to enforce local law and ordinances without the authority to make an arrest. That can run the gamut from handling refuse illegally dumped behind houses – a responsibility that, by ordinance, falls often unfairly on the property owner nearest to the junk – to leading a dozen raccoons out of a dumpster behind commercial property. Code enforcement also handles calls involving illegal homeless camps.
Durango Code Enforcement Officer Steve Barkley shares duties with one other officer. Barkley has worked as an officer for 13 years and said code policing has shifted in that time from proactive to reactive. A growing population is responsible for that, he said, and the workload has mounted.
In the first quarter of 2015, the city received 1,578 service calls; 2,207 in the second quarter. Barkley said code enforcement is averaging 49 calls and seven citations daily. Since the beginning of the year, calls have increased by 53 percent.
La Plata County could not provide precise data for 2015 or the past two years, but Code Enforcement Officer Marianna Spishock said most reports received do not evolve into citations. This year, the department is averaging 10 to 30 complaints weekly.
“Most recently, things have changed up in the past year, with a lot of inquiries related to property sales,” Spishock said. “A lot of those calls have morphed into violations because there is something on the property not permitted or inspected.”
That includes garages, sheds and basements converted to residential space, also known as accessory dwelling units.
“When property owners change, code violations are typically brought to our attention,” Spishock said. “We base the information we give the buyer or buyer’s agent on whether the permits line up with what’s on the site.”
Unlike the county, Durango does not mandate on-the-record complaints, and Barkley estimates 10 to 15 percent are anonymous. Conversely, the county wants contact information on file in the event a complaint escalates to litigation, Spishock said.
This time of year, the most common type of complaint is related to wildlife in trash. Barkley said there is a spike in those types of calls each spring when bears wake from hibernation and each fall as they prepare for it. This usually occurs in areas where college students rent housing with unsecured trash cans are ubiquitous.
There are some variations between county and city code. For example, the county does not have enforcement measures in place to regulate barking-dog complaints, though officials are working on that now.
In recent years, the city of Cortez has ramped up code policing efforts. In August, the city building and planning department reported data that shows a 513 percent increase in code enforcement action since 2012.
Starting in January, code enforcement in the city of Durango is supposed to take a proactive turn when officials start cracking down on ADU violations.
Property owners in different city neighborhoods have been given varying deadlines to register their ADUs. City Planning Manager Nicol Killian said since the city began regulating ADU registration, staff has not proactively patrolled for code violations.
“We’ve offered fee breaks for them to register,” she said. “We want to work with people as much as possible, but after the end of the year, we may not be so lenient. We don’t want to go there, but by the end of December, they’ve had a year and a half to register.”
But it is still unclear how Durango will effectively take the initiative in violation enforcement, which is largely reliant on resident complaints. Lack of staff and resources to spend the day patrolling for violations keep both county and city code enforcement mostly report-driven, say enforcement officers.
Though the topic comes up annually as the city prepares the budget, Durango has yet to replace a third code enforcement officer who left during the recession, Barkley said. But it’s a critical department to maintain because maintaining a safe, clean and valuable community is at the core of code enforcement’s purpose, he said.
Multiple reports, including one released last year by The Reinvestment Fund, which funds neighborhood revitalization, point to correlations between strong code enforcement and low crime in communities across the nation.
“In the overall scheme of things, the job is to keep property values worth what they’re at,” Barkley said. “Cities with code enforcement problems, whether it’s because they’re understaffed or what, see lower property values. They tend to remain higher, and crime rates tend to be lower, where code enforcement keeps an area clean and well-kept.”
jpace@durangoherald.com
