Volunteers to Crack Down on Building Code Violators

They’re coming to a neighborhood near you.

And they’re taking notes.

Beginning today, teams of roving volunteers will be scouring city streets, on the lookout for the kind of annoying building code violations that reduce property values, give visual offense and belong in City Hall’s favorite new category of criminality--affronts to “quality of life.”

“It sounds to me like what they’re doing is formalizing what already occurs in many neighborhoods anyway,” said Doug Mirell, an attorney who serves on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “People who are busybodies, who have time on their hands, who are concerned about such things, probably already do this.”

But Mayor Richard Riordan sees the program not as official ratification of good old-fashioned snooping, but as an innovative example of what he likes to call empowerment. “This is not vigilantism,” the mayor says. “We are not trying to punish anybody. This is about neighbors helping to make their neighborhoods better places.”

The pilot program, dubbed Neighborhood Codewatch, debuted in the San Fernando Valley on Thursday to applause from community and business leaders, who hope it will relieve pressure on the city’s overburdened building inspectors and give neighborhoods a new tool with which to fight encroaching urban blight.

The volunteer patrols will augment an official inspection effort that faces increasing pressure to enforce building codes that protect residents from unsafe living conditions in the wake of fatal fires in illegal garage apartments.

At Thursday’s launch, both Riordan and Valley Councilwoman Laura Chick said Codewatch is designed to respect property owners’ rights and to avoid personal confrontations, and rejected the notion that it will give too much power to overzealous neighborhood snoops.

Modeled after a similar effort in San Diego, the Codewatch program was proposed by Chick and approved by the City Council in March. It will operate over the next two months in five of the city’s 15 council districts, including parts of the Valley, West Los Angeles and South-Central Los Angeles. It is expected to go citywide in January.

Patrolling in pairs, volunteers will monitor both residential and business areas, looking for any of 12 specific code violations, including cars parked on lawns, abandoned vehicles, improper RV and boat storage, overgrown vegetation and general property disrepair.

They are not allowed to go onto private property and must patrol at least three blocks from their homes, both to protect their safety and to assure that they do not use the program to pursue personal vendettas, said Karen Wagener, head of the mayor’s volunteer bureau.

Once a violation has been identified, the volunteer will send the property owner a form letter detailing the problem and explaining how to correct it.

“We send them a very friendly letter,” which, Wagener said, will be signed with the name of the local volunteer group and not the specific volunteer who spotted the violation.

“They are told they will be visited again in 15 days. If they take care of the problem in that time we send them a thank-you card,” she added. If they do not, the volunteers will take photographs of the violation and forward those to city inspectors, who can ultimately issue citations and fines.

That last step creates its own set of concerns.

“Unless there’s specific funding appropriated [for enforcement] . . . it sounds to me like more of a PR effort that anything that’s likely to make a significant difference in the environment,” said the ACLU’s Mirell.

Councilman Richard Alarcon said he supports the program but that it must be monitored to make sure it does not create new enforcement problems. “If the city receives a flood of minor complaints, it could leave larger issues unresolved,” he said. “That could be a problem.

The head of the city Community Inspection Division, Phillip Kaainoa, said officials are not yet sure “if it’s going to make more work or less work for us. The hope is that people will voluntarily comply and there will be less work.”

That’s what happened in San Diego, where the program was pioneered by Mayor Susan Golding two years ago.

“We found a lot of people just didn’t know they were in violation of city codes,” said Todd Harris, Golding’s press secretary. “We viewed it as a way of education . . . a way of working with the community to improve their neighborhoods.”

Harris said the city’s workload did not increase because more than 75% of those who received notices from the volunteers cleaned up the violations on their own.

Chick hopes for similar results here. “What we are doing is taking what is happening already and doing it in a more appropriate way. It’s preventive and it’s cost effective,” she said.

City officials say volunteers have received a day of training in hopes of avoiding problems caused by overzealous amateur inspectors.

“We don’t want this to be ridiculous; this is really for problem properties,” Wagener said. “An important part of the training period was making sure that that the volunteers use good judgment.”

Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Dan Mastro, who helped trained the first volunteers, said they have been advised to walk their dogs while on patrol and refrain from taking obvious notes, to avoid provoking confrontations with potentially belligerent hard-core code violators. “You can bank that if you’re a civilian and you’re out in front of someone’s house with a note pad taking pictures, and they see you, there’s going to be a problem,” he said.

That doesn’t worry Studio City homeowner Polly Ward, who was one of the first to volunteer for Codewatch.

“This is an opportunity to do something instead of sitting around complaining,” Ward said. “It will be good for the neighborhoods and good for the property owners who have a chance to correct their violation without being cited.”

And the effort probably will be welcomed in some neighborhoods, where neglected properties have drawn neighbors’ ire.

“I’m 100% behind it,” said Art Quinn, leaning on the chain-link fence that separates his tidy Reseda home from the house next door. He has complained to the city numerous times, he said, about his neighbors, who drain their pool into his yard and flood his walkway so he can’t navigate the sidewalk with his cane.

“I talk to the guy about it and all I get is an argument, no cooperation,” he said. “It’s not worth getting a heart attack over. Maybe if he hears it from somebody else, he’ll understand.”

Of course, they’ll have to be from more than three blocks away.

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An Eye Out for Eyesores

* Refuse collection

* Graffiti

* Parking on lawns

* Open storage

* Abandoned vehicles

* RV / boat storage

* Sidewalk disrepair

* Auto repair in residential areas

* General disrepair of properties

* Illegal posting of handbills

* Excessive or overgrown vegetation