MORGANTOWN — Clarksburg Deputy Police Chief Randy Hartley said the city has used its drug house, or nuisance, ordinance to great effect since passing it in October of 2017.
Drug house laws — aimed at curbing reoccurring behavior by holding property owners responsible for what goes on in their properties — are on the books in most of the state’s larger cities, including Charleston, Huntington, Wheeling, Bridgeport and Clarksburg. Locally, Westover has a drug house law.
The Greenmont Neighborhood Association wants to add Morgantown to that list. The group plans to approach Morgantown City Council about it during its Feb. 25 committee of the whole meeting.
“There has been a lot of positive from it. Out of the probably two dozen instances we’ve worked on and ended up notifying the property owner, all but probably two of the property owners were very up front and helpful, very compliant,” Hartley said, explaining that the law deals with more than drug activity.
“Basically if there’s any activity that becomes a public nuisance. We’re not looking to run people’s property, but you know it when you see it,” he said. “When you’re at a property 199 times in 18 months — and that’s a real number from a previous case — then that’s a public nuisance. If they can’t step in and take care of it themselves, then we’re going to step in and help them.”
The laws vary from city to city. For example, in Bridgeport, two offenses at a property in a 12-month span will trigger an abatement notice to the property owner. In Clarksburg, the law says whenever two or three residents make a complaint, the city will take a look.
Penalties for property owners can range from loss of permits to daily fines and even condemnation. Once a property owner is contacted, the typical result is eviction of the tenants.
Morgantown Police Chief Ed Preston said the laws can be effective, as witnessed in cities statewide. The key, he explained, is tailoring the law to fit the city — and plenty of due diligence.
“Cut and paste doesn’t work in these situations,” Preston said. “You have to do the due diligence to make sure you’re not violating the law down the road. There’s always the unintended consequence. So you want to make sure the unintended consequence is not creating a larger problem than what you had originally.”
Preston said part of the vetting process is ensuring there is no infringement of civil rights and that due process is carried out.
The ACLU of West Virginia recently reached out to the city with a letter opposing the introduction of such a law.
During council’s most recent committee of the whole session, Mollie Kennedy, community outreach director for the organization, said the laws discourage the reporting of crime out of fear of eviction and often don’t differentiate between crimes committed by tenants and crimes committed against tenants.
“In sum, these ordinances are unconstitutional. They’re in likely violation of fair housing laws and they’re poor public policy,” Kennedy said. “So we would really urge the city very strongly to do the right thing and decline to proceed with any sort of consideration of a nuisance ordinance.”
Hartley said he’s not aware of any legal challenges to Clarksburg’s law.
According to Preston, the issues raised by the ACLU will be part of the city’s administrative review of any law that might come out of this process.
“I really think that it’s so early in the conversation for positions to be taken – vehemently for or vehemently against. This may not be the time for that because this hasn’t gone through the vetting process. There isn’t even anything up for proposal yet to say this is how it would work or what it would look like. It’s so early on,” Preston said. “Right now, we’re talking about a proposal from a neighborhood association that hasn’t even gone into a draft ordinance before the city attorney. We’re way early in this process.”
The Dominion Post also reached out to representatives of Westover, Charleston and Bridgeport for this report.
