After last year’s resident survey, which saw only 24% of residents approve of Wichita’s code enforcement, the city has added funding to its new budget proposal that would help boost enforcement.
The proposed 2024-2025 city budget would include an additional $112,000 for nuisance abatement next year and an additional $100,000 for the demolition of structures deemed dangerous and unsafe.
Chris Labrum, the director of the Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department, shared with the Wichita Eagle that the city is “seeing an increase in nuisance conditions and blight in some areas.”
“We have consistently gotten requests from neighborhood associations and neighbors to do more with and be more aggressive with those properties,” Labrum said.
Labrum’s department is responsible for inspections, notifying property owners of violations, and bidding out work when owners fail to make fixes on their own.
When a property is deemed a nuisance, the owner will is notified and given anywhere from seven to 30 days to address the problems or show progress is being made. MABCD data shows that the voluntary compliance rate is 87%.
However, some of the nearly 10,000 cases that MABCD deals with every year end up in court, which further delays the process of getting things addressed, as the department has to be given an order to gain entry so it can inspect the property.
Janet Radig, the president of the McAdams Neighborhood Association in northeast Wichita, also spoke with Eagle about the issues facing the city, noting that she wants to see problem houses addressed quicker.
“There is a lot of dilapidated housing and people not doing what they need to do, landlords not doing what they need to do,” Radig said.
In recent years, Labrum says he has worked to remove as many administrative slowdowns as possible. Now he says the additional resources will help his department act quicker when it comes to inspecting nuisances and fixes when needed, the Eagle shared.
City Council member Mike Hoeisel, who represents Whichita’s District 3, says that residents talk with him almost daily about concerns they have over health, safety, and property value as a result of the nuisance houses.
“We have to have a budget to make sure we can clean that up,” Hoheisel said. “We just blow through these budgets to where we’re having to find money elsewhere at the end of the year to help cover some of these issues that we’re facing. I think it’s wholly appropriate that we just go ahead and allocate more resources on the front end.”
The new budget will pre presented to the City Council on Tuesday. It will then be followed by a series of public budget hearings before it is finalized and adopted.
Related
Related
