Atlanta tries to fix code enforcement office hit by audit

“I knew the guy, so I told him that he had to get that thing out of there,” Smith said.

The city’s Code Compliance Office is supposed to deal with such issues. Until recently, however, the office was so poorly managed that records often vanished, inspectors logged in jobs before they even visited the site, and response time on “highly hazardous” cases, reported to take an average of 14 days, averaged 170 days instead, an audit by the city found.

“The OCC lacks reliable data to prioritize, track and manage its code compliance complaints, measure its progress toward meeting performance standards, or determine staffing requirements," City Auditor Leslie Ward's report said. “The office also lacks written procedures for calculating and reporting workload and performance data. As a result, the office has publicly reported data that overstated its performance and misrepresented the makeup of its complaints.”

The audit was conducted after City Council members and Office of Code Compliance staff expressed a need for more inspectors. The audit, which looked at fiscal year 2008 through January 2010, was published in June.

“There is no doubt that code compliance was massively broken. We saw that when we got it,” said the city’s chief operating officer, Peter Aman.

Aman said all of the old managers are gone, and the office was moved under the direct supervision of the mayor’s office and Deputy Chief Operating Officer Duriya Farooqui. The last two directors of the office were terminated, and a new director, Kevin Bean, was hired about two weeks ago.

"Our communities are destabilized as a consequence of code violations," said Councilman Ivory Lee Young, who is a member of a City Council committee that has ordered a three-hour public work session at 1 p.m. Tuesday to look at code compliance. "They did the best with the resources that are available, and I applaud the recent attempts by the administration. But we have to tactically and strategically use our resources in creative ways to tackle this big problem."

Thirty-nine people work in the Office of Code Compliance: Five are supervisors and 24 are officers, with the remainder serving as support staff. Farooqui said the goal is to shorten inspection times and eliminate redundancies in reporting complaints.

"If there is a vacant house that is not boarded up or demolished, the chances that it could become a haven for criminal behavior are much higher," she said. "It is critical to our success as a city to make sure code enforcement is done right."

Farooqui said as recently as January, it could take up to seven months to conduct an initial inspection, find the owner and reinspect the property. If court, further inspections or demolitions were needed, the process could take 16 months. She said with the new policies, those first three steps should now take no more than two months. And a case that goes all the way would take no more than six months.

In the 35-page report, auditors found that the Code Compliance Office's staff routinely overstated accomplishments by manually entering an inspection date for complaints that had not yet been inspected. In November 2009, the office reported that the average time to inspect a "highly hazardous” case -- something that includes open and vacant lots, raw sewage and properties without heat or water -- was 14 days (the office's goal was seven days).

But auditors discovered that the average time was actually more than five and a half months.

Overall, part of the problem might have been the physical condition of the office. Hard copy files were “disorganized, inconsistent and incomplete.” As part of the audit, investigators asked to randomly inspect 35 paper files, but the staff was not able to locate 21 of them.

Ron Lall, an Ormewood Park homeowner, said he tried to help several years ago.

"I went out once and took pictures of 10 locations in the neighborhood where we had vacant abandoned properties," said Lall, community safety director for his neighborhood planning unit. "And I went in and gave them the photographs, the addresses, and I had even provided the names of owners."

Lall said he watched as a code inspector checked the files for the 10 properties. When they were not found in the system, the worker entered the data, Lall said.

"So I met with them a couple of months later to get a status check," Lall said. "When they looked back, they couldn’t find the cases. Their whole system was broken."

A $1.6 million computer system failed to resolve many of the problems. Office employees identified 65 hardware and software problems in November 2009, which delayed entering information on new cases and resulted in some missing data.

Farooqui admitted that the new computer system "under-delivered in what we expected it to do." She said the city has fixed all of the computer bugs, and among other things, increased fines and fees; staged multi-department code "blitzes" into blighted neighborhoods and established a two-year jurisdiction over properties that have already been cited.

Last Friday, code inspector Ezron Benjamin made his morning rounds through southeast Atlanta. Inspectors are expected to make at least 10 inspections a day. Prior to the reorganization, inspectors had to conduct 20 a day. But that target number was reduced because inspectors now also do research and attend court hearings, which hadn't been part of their duties.

Benjamin hit four properties on Waters Road. At one stop, he met with a homeowner. The property wasn't as bad as the complaint indicated, and Benjamin told him to keep his property up. Two of the homes -- one boarded up and one occupied -- were documented. Benjamin planned to give the property owners warnings -- once he found them.

But it was the first house that is a symbol of Atlanta's problems. Located at Waters and Hapeville roads, the wood-frame house was a dump. It was both vacant and open, which classifies it as highly hazardous.

Trash and tires covered the yards. Debris was so thick that a photographer accompanying Benjamin had to watch his every step so as not to step on a rusty nail. A tree, felled by rot or lightning, rested on the caved-in roof. Benjamin tacked a WARNING sign onto the fragile porch.

By late morning, Benjamin was back at his desk, trying to find the three owners.

"You find an address, but it is for that vacant address, so you can't send a notice there. It doesn't make any sense," said Benjamin, who also did code enforcement in New York City.

Across town, it's a battle that Councilman Young has been fighting for years. He represents English Avenue and Vine City, which has one of the city's lowest rates of owner-occupied properties. He said of the 50 phone calls his office gets a day about city services, "no less than 30 to 40 percent of those calls are housing code-related.”

"We need help, and the response has to be a comprehensive one. Right now, the owners of vacant and abandoned properties can find loophole after loophole to get around severe penalties for the kinds of violations that appear in our communities," Young said. "... Our communities operate best when its residents take responsibility."

Juno said he will continue to complain to the Code Compliance Office, including providing them a monthly spreadsheet detailing problems in his neighborhood.

"I will believe in the changes when I see them," he said.

Audit's recommendations

After an extensive investigation into Atlanta’s Code Compliance Office, the city auditor’s office made four key recommendations:

City Auditor Leslie Ward said, "We thought we’d find a backlog of cases because of staffing shortages, but what we found was largely a need for better management. Since the mayor’s office assessed the situation similarly, I’m hopeful that they’ll act on our recommendations and turn things around."

Getting tougher

As part of tightening the code process, the city of Atlanta has instituted stiffer penalties against property owners who violate the city's code mandates.

Meet our reporter

Ernie Suggs, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter since 1997, covers the city of Atlanta. Throughout his career at the AJC, he also covered higher education, race, civil rights and state politics. A graduate of North Carolina Central University, Suggs has also been an award-winning journalist for Gannett Westchester Newspapers and The Durham Herald-Sun. The former vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists, he was a 2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, whose board he now sits on.

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