Old junked cars, broken bicycles, salvaged boats, stacks of wood and collections of spare parts, a yard full of stuff. And amid it all, a house in serious disrepair — boarded-up windows, pealing paint, maybe a half-fallen roof.
“Do we want to take this on?” First Selectman Rudy Marconi asked the selectmen last Wednesday. “If so, we’ll start working.”
“I think we should take it up,” said Selectman Andy Bodner.
There was a nodding of heads and mumbled consent.
And so the selectmen are again looking into creating a “blight law” that they hope will give the town a reasonable means to help citizens who feel seriously aggrieved by the condition of a neighboring property.
“This is not an ordinance to force people to paint their houses or mow their laws,” Mr. Marconi said this week. “It’s an ordinance that helps protect property values.”
The law would be designed as a last resort in truly extreme situations, where “your neighbor has a tremendous amount of junk stored outside, all over, with multiple cars, broken widows boarded up houses, that type of thing,” Mr. Marconi said.
“We’re not looking to become the police of grass mowing,” he said.
It’s something the selectmen worked on long, hard and to no avail a couple of years ago. They couldn’t come up with the right wording, strike the right balance.
It proved very hard to write a law that would put the town in a position to really step in and take care of a problem, without setting up what seemed a glide-path to intrusive government, an invitation for over-meticulous homeowners to file complaints against neighbors who simply didn’t care much for trimming hedges and painting the garage.
Now, they have a model, an example to work from.
“There seemed to be a consensus to move forward with the drafting of a blight ordinance that pretty much will mirror Newtown’s recently passed blight ordinance,” Mr. Marconi said, looking back on last week’s selectmen’s meeting.
Newtown’s eight-page ordinance creates a position of town “anti-blight enforcement officer,” calls for $100-a-day fines for problems that remain past the time allotted for correction, and allows property owners to file for a hearing to contest blight charges against them.
The ordinance has four pages of definitions including a nearly page-long definition of “blight” with four sections and eight subsections. That includes:
“Conditions that pose a serious threat to the safety, health and general welfare of the community as determined by the anti-blight enforcement officer; Conditions that attract, harbor or conceal illegal activity as documented by the police department;
“Any premises not being adequately maintained as evidenced by the existence of one or more of the following conditions: Contains any building or structure that is open to the elements, has collapsed or is missing walls, roofs, windows, doors; Contains any building or structure that is unable to provide shelter, or serve the purpose for which it was constructed due to significant damage, dilapidation, decay or severe animal, rodent, vermin or insect infestation, or; the premises is in public view and, as determined by the anti-blight enforcement officer, is neglected or abandoned…”
The Newtown law also targets “discarded or unused materials or equipment such as unregistered motor vehicles, boats, sporting and recreation vehicles which may be missing parts, not complete in appearance or in an obvious state of disrepair or decay … household or commercial furniture, appliances, drums, cans, boxes, scrap metal, tires, batteries, containers and garbage in the public view…”
The ordinance came to Mr. Marconi’s attention because Newtown and Ridgefield employ the same law firm, Cohen and Wolf, for town counsel duties.
With Newtown’s work to serve as a model, Mr. Marconi expects to put a proposed Ridgefield law on the selectmen’s table soon.
“We probably will have something available during the meeting of Sept. 18,” he said. “That’s our next meeting.”
At the brief discussion at last week’s meeting ended, he asked the selectmen if they were inclined to call the proposed new legislation a “property maintenance ordinance” or a “blight law.”
“I like ‘blight’ — says it all,” Mr. Bodner replied.