Huntsville City Council holds work session to discuss unkept properties
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — The Huntsville City Council hears from concerned community members about unkept properties all the time. A work session was held Friday morning to address these concerns.
The number of these rose to a point where District 2 Councilman David Little asked for a work session to discuss what the council can do to address these issues.
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During the work session, Huntsville Community Development Manager Scott Erwin gave a presentation to the council on what his department does to enforce the upkeep of properties.
Erwin said the department issued about 8,300 notices in 2024. A majority of which were due to the condition of people's yards and houses. Around 5,600 people voluntarily complied and fixed the issue, while 2,600 didn't in the time allowed.
Therefore, the City had to step in.
'One of our priorities is educating our community and increasing our voluntary compliance rates for grass, weeds, junk, house structures,' Erwin said. 'We find that we have a very high success rate when we educate and inform our community when there is an issue they might be in violation of.'
City leaders hear the frustrations of those living near the nuisance properties, but said they have to give everyone due process to fix the issues.
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'If we are not following due process, then all of a sudden it is a federal issue,' Little said. 'It could be something as small as a weed issue could become a Supreme Court issue.'
Due to the number of people who voluntarily complied after receiving a citation, District 3 Councilwoman Jennie Robinson said during the meeting that if the Community Development Department issued more citations, it could help properties get cleaned up faster.
Erwin said the department has seven inspectors, which can make it hard to get out to every area of the City in a timely fashion, which led to the council being introduced to a new technology that could help.
Huntsville's Chief Innovation Officer, Larry Lowe, presented an option that the council could consider, which would add cameras to garbage trucks. These cameras would scan people's properties when picking up trash.
'Essentially, what would happen is the garbage truck would drive every single road, they would take an image, and they would process the data,' Lowe said.
This would alert the department to potential violations but wouldn't automatically result in a citation.
'It simply gives us where a potential violation may be,' Erwin said. 'We will lay eyes on it, again, we are not going through neighbors looking, it actually tells us where they may be a condition that exists.'
Little said he's all on board with this and wants the council to act quickly on it.
He also said that he knows enforcing the care of these properties can be a double-edged sword.
'Somebody's having a hardship, you know well, let's give them another 10 days,' Little said. 'There's other times when people are gaming the system, or hard to track down, and now the neighbors are dealing with this blighted property, so what can we do to protect them too.'
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