Protecting property values: Codes enforcement

Those are the kinds of public eyesores that The Dalles Codes Enforcement Officer Nikki Lesich works to eradicate. All the properties were about to receive correction notices from her.

Protection of property values is at the root of her work. She said homes are usually their owner’s most valuable possessions, and if neighboring properties are junky, it drags their own property value down.

One persistent misperception Lesich often encounters is what the public right-of-way, or streets and sidewalks, can be used for. She’ll tell people they can’t park their trailer in the street, or stack a pile of leaves in it.

“I tell them, ‘It’s not for your personal use. It’s for the public.’ ‘But I am the public,’ is the typical response,” she said.

She will again explain that it isn’t for their own use. If things really start going in circles and the citizen is refusing to believe they don’t have a right to use the road that way, she will call for a police officer to come explain it to them.

“The police force has been an amazing partner for me, increasingly in the last three or four years,” said Lesich, who has been the full-time codes enforcement officer since 2010. She doesn’t use them for intimidation, she said, but for her own protection. She’ll call for officer backup about two times a month on average.

She’ll ask the police if a property she’s been asked to address has drawn any police responses in the past. If there is, “they will say, ‘Don’t go there alone.’”

She keeps a constant eye as she drives around town – typically she responds to about 15 issues a day – for various problems. If she sees RVs for sale, she’ll call the number. It’s okay to have vehicles parked in front of the owner’s house, but it’s not okay to find a highly trafficked street and park it there for better exposure.

It’s also the time of year for fall cleanup, and city rules prohibit piling leaves in the road. “You don’t get to put it in the street for the city to pick up. That’s a violation,” she said.

She got one such complaint because nearby residents grew alarmed when they saw passers-by flicking cigarettes directly into the dry, combustible pile of leaves.

“You see the worst behaviors out here and you see the best behaviors. There’s people that have stories. You need to have that compassion threading through this job,” she said.

Say a complaint comes in about overgrown grass. She contacts the resident and learns of tough times. “Cutting grass is not the most important thing when you have a kid going through chemo.” But she still tries to get people in tough circumstances to reach out for help to address problems. Maybe they could ask a friend to help them mow, for example.

She often gets calls about abandoned vehicles, and she has a trick of glancing under cars to see if they still have gravel under them from last winter. That’s a clue that the vehicle hasn’t moved in many months.

She marks abandoned vehicles with a bright green sticker, telling the owner they have five days to move it. It lists the city’s number for people to call to learn where it has been towed to.

“So many don’t call,” she said. For that reason, she doesn’t have cars towed away on Thursdays or Fridays, so storage fees don’t mount.

If a vehicle is towed, getting it back requires paying a $100 fee to the city, and then paying more to the towing company for towing and storage fees. To get the vehicle back, owners need to provide current tags — she said 90 percent of them have expired tags when they are marked for tow — proof of ownership and their own valid ID.

She also works extensively with puncture vine, or goats heads, a groundcover weed that produces hard, spiky seeds that are death to bike tires and very painful to feet.

Lesich said the only time it is effective to spray puncture vine is in the spring before they blossom or while they are blossoming and producing their yellow flowers.

Spraying at any other time will kill the vine but not the root, and the seeds will drop and replant.

As she drove around town recently, she pointed out common violations. One is leaving garbage cans out by the curbside all the time.

She spends on average two to four hours a day out and about, inspecting complaints, re-inspecting them to check for compliance, meeting with people, and tagging vehicles.

She pays particular attention to the sidewalks that are heavily used routes to school to make sure they are cleared of snow in winter and that overhead vegetation is trimmed to the required nine feet above the sidewalk and 14 feet above the street.

When she responds to a complaint, she checks the entire block — or, in one recent case, alleyway. As she drove down it, she said the one complaint would turn into four or five.

“Alleyways have the best discoveries and the worst threats,” she said, for fire hazards or for garbage that draws rodents.

Alleyways can be a gathering point for junked vehicles or just junk in general. The right of way must be free of such obstructions, and the usual boundary for the right of way is where the power poles are.

“The public right of way is not a storage area and not a staging area,” she said.

One property had a significant amount of junk, some of it in a trailer, stored in the alley.

She said that several property owners would be getting letters telling them to clean up. “Hopefully they help each other out,” she said.

Another alley had a dangerously leaning shed that was long past its usefulness. Lesich had posted it earlier as a dangerous building that needed removal. She was coming back to check if anything had been done. It hadn’t. She would be back in contact with the owner.

“When I was a kid that would’ve been attractive for me to go in and mess around, not thinking it would collapse on me,” she said.

One of the most common complaints she gets is about overgrown vegetation. “It is so ready to go up in smoke.”

And, for those properties that have already been lost to fire, Lesich sometimes has to nudge owners to raze the building.

As for the place with the couches and barbecue, Lesich said she’s dealt with that property owner before, and he writes notes back to her, telling her to quit snooping.

But the backside of his west end property is easily accessible by a wide gravel road.

She has noticed that when properties let junk accumulate, especially at the back of the property if it abuts a road, it becomes a draw for other people to drop stuff there. The city ordinance doesn’t care if somebody else dropped junk on your property; it’s still your obligation to remove it.

Asked if the homeless population has become an increasing issue for her, Lesich said it has become more noticeable in the last few years. She’s dealt with people camping in backyards in tents, trailers and motor homes. They are there with permission, but they are creating an eyesore or are in a dangerous living situation that violates city regulations.

Lesich was once mayor of The Dalles, but before she joined city government in any capacity, she was a citizen who pointed out that she’d seen 32 cars for sale throughout downtown and elsewhere, and 21 of them had the same number to call.

“It was like the whole town turned into a car lot,” she said. The then-mayor, Robb Van Cleave, invited Lesich to be on the city’s budget committee. There, she successfully lobbied for the city’s codes enforcement position to be increased from half-time to full-time.

A few years later, when the position became open, Lesich applied. “I knew I was looking for something meaningful to do for my work and I thought, ‘I really do like this job.’”