MORGANTOWN — Tuesday night’s Morgantown City Council committee of the whole meeting proved two things — the issues surrounding the proposed drug house, or nuisance, ordinance are complex; and a lot of people are paying attention.
An overflow crowd packed council chambers to take in the session, which, more than three hours in, had managed to grind about halfway through the scheduled agenda.
Adelheid Schaupp, a property owner and landlord representing the Greenmont neighborhood, explained why the city is in need of a law that will force absentee property owners to take responsibility for repeated criminal violations in their properties.
Schaupp explained that many of the unwanted issues facing the city’s downtown have filtered into Greenmont and taken up residence in specific properties, some of which are actively rented, but many of which are vacant structures.
Under the draft nuisance ordinance brought by Schaupp, two or more instances of illegal activity in a property, supported “by a preponderance of evidence,” and reported by the police, code enforcement or fire marshals, would trigger an order of abatement to the property owner, who would either remedy the issue or face daily fines ranging from $100 to $1,000.
The ordinance provides for an appeal process through circuit court and attempts to head off concerns raised about the catch-all nature of such laws by stipulating domestic violence calls would not fall under the nuisance category.
“There are two issues here. One is we have a pocket of mismanaged or neglected properties by either absentee or apathetic property owners,” Schaupp said. “The second one is we have a large number of vacant or abandoned houses that are being used for illegal habitation and criminal activity.”
Opponents of such nuisance laws, including Liira Raines of Our Future West Virginia, say that while such laws often come from a community-minded place, they lack due process in that they don’t require convictions.
Ultimately, Raines said, while the property owners are the ones targeted in the ordinance, evicting poor tenants is often the most direct course of action, typically followed by the implementation of background checks for future tenants.
Further, Raines said the city already has the means to deal with these issues.
“A lot of the problems we have are just a lack of enforcement of the laws we already have. We have laws to address vacant property. We have laws on the books to address dilapidated property. We have laws on the books to address every single behavior that has been described here,” Raines said.
The city currently has a nuisance ordinance on the books, but it is cumbersome in that it requires issues being brought to the city manager who then decides whether or not to take it to city council. It is rarely used.
Morgantown Police Chief Ed Preston said it’s probably time the city revisit some of these codes.
“It’s time for us to seriously look at our ordinances and look at what is allowable, what is tolerable and what is going to be held accountable for,” Preston said.
“In all reality, the majority of the situations that we’re dealing with and we’re seeing from the police and code enforcement tend to be repeats at the same properties that are nuisance properties and have been nuisance properties by the same nuisance property owners, over and over again.”
