Raise the Hammer
By Matt Jelly
Published February 16, 2010
I'll be making a presentation to the City's Economic Development and Planning committee today, regarding the results of By-Law Crawl and some steps the City can take to make By-Law Enforcement more effective, especially in terms of vacant and derelict buildings.
I'll be making three suggestions to the committee in this regard, as a starting point for a series of improvements.
I'd like to invite you to this public meeting to show your support. I'll be answering any questions people may have about By-Law Crawl and the next steps this group will take in months to come.
The meeting will be held at the Albion Room, Hamilton Convention Centre, 1 Summers Lane, Hamilton ON (see Google map).
The meeting begins at 1 PM. I am in the middle of the agenda, so I will not be speaking right at 1 PM, but sometime closer to 2 PM.
By Robert D (anonymous) | Posted February 16, 2010 at 09:04:14
I can't be there in person Matt, but I will be there in Spirit!
Just a quick update on this EDP meeting:
Brian McHattie made a motion to set up a meeting with Marty Hazell and staff to take my suggestions into consideration and start working on them, see what's possible.
My suggestions were: a) to set up a group of students (similar to what the city has done in property maintenance) to regularly check up on the exteriors of vacant buildings and report findings to by-law staff b) to order a review of the complaints process to ensure that complaints are received and the person who makes the complaint is responded to, and c) that the Vacant Building Protocol be revised to require inspections of vacant buildings on a monthly basis as opposed to every three months.
Brian is setting up a meeting to discuss these options. I'll send out an update when that meeting happens, and I'll let you know what comes out of it.
These suggestions just address fundamentals- asking for more eyes to be on vacant buildings, and that the complaints process is in working order. Once that's taken care of, I'll be making further suggestions to improve the process. This is a starting point.
If anyone else has ideas about how the process could work better, share them!
By Robert D (anonymous) | Posted February 17, 2010 at 09:26:38
Thanks for the update Matt. Those all sound like good suggestions.
I think you should also address the issue of these by-law crawls, and what role these crawls are to play in the whole process. Are they just additional eyes? Will you be submitting one table with all the violations noted, or will each individual by-law cralwer be submitting complaints that have to be responded to? Just a few things to think about.
Hi Robert,
Participants are encouraged to submit complaints either through By-Law Crawl or directly to the city at mle@hamilton.ca. So far, the Crawl has generated reports on 34 buildings- but some people may have also submitted reports on their own.
Our group is definitely an extra set of eyes, as well as an advocate of improved policies and protocols when it comes to by-law enforcement. The mandate of By-Law Crawl is to encourage the City to act in a way that eventually makes By-Law Crawl obsolete.
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