Jefferson County soon will be a little tidier, now that the County Council has committed to spending $250,000 to alleviate nuisance properties.
The County Council voted unanimously April 25 to commit the funds from the $43.7 million the county will receive over the next two years under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) to clean up some of the many problem properties in the county. County Services Director Eric Larson said.
“I’d say at any given time, there are about 100 buildings in the (unincorporated) county that need to be demolished,” he said. “Some of those were damaged in fires, and others are just succumbing to age, with crumbling foundations, roofs falling in and other problems.
“Then we have hundreds of other properties where things are not as bad. Sometimes the building just needs a door or window boarded up,” he said. “Many of them have trash and debris on the property, and then you’ve got abandoned vehicles. Almost all of them have overgrown weeds.”
Larson said his office fields about 400 calls a year about nuisance properties, but historically, the county has lacked the resources to deal with most of them.
“The budget usually includes about $20,000 a year for nuisance eradication, which allows us to address four or five off our list,” he said. “We try to take care of the most dangerous ones, or the ones that have been on the list for a long time.”
The ARPA funding, Larson said, will cut into that list quite a bit.
“That quarter million should allow us to take care of 30 or 35 of the projects on the list, depending on how bids come in for the work. If we can do more because the bids are lower than we’ve estimated, we’ll do more,” he said. “If the bids are higher, we might not get to as many. But we’re going to address as many of these concerns as we can.”
Larson said the priority list for the ARPA funds is spread throughout the county.
“There are a couple of houses north of Jefferson College in Hillsboro we’d like to get demolished,” he said. “There’s a mobile home park in Dittmer that we’d like to be able to clean up that’s been a problem for some time. In Imperial, there are abandoned yards off the beaten path that have a lot of junk in them that need to be cleaned up.”
Larson said the list was developed by considering public safety and how long the land has been on the nuisance list.
“If it’s a burned-out house that’s in a neighborhood where there are teenagers or young adults or other curious people, we want to take that down as soon as possible,” he said. “We’ll try to get to as many as we can, but I can say this money will make a big difference over the next year and a half.”
What are nuisance properties?
Larson said almost every city and every county maintains a list of nuisance properties.
“Jefferson County has different challenges than, say, the city of St. Louis has. Many times, they (St. Louis officials) can call in a bulldozer and take care of a city block of abandoned buildings. Jefferson County takes in a lot of land area, and our problems are spread out all over,” he said.
In the vast majority of cases, the property has been abandoned by its owners.
“Sometimes the owner passes away, and the family doesn’t have much interest in maintaining the property or they lose interest over time. They stop paying the taxes on it,” Larson said. “Eventually it goes into receivership. After big floods, some people just walk away from their flooded-out homes.”
In all cases, Larson said, his department tries to work with the property owner – if he or she can be found.
“This is not a dictatorship where we tell people what they have to do and when they need to do it. Sometimes, someone is ill or has passed away, and there are ownership or title issues. We try to work with the people to bring them into compliance rather than spend taxpayer money to clean it up for them. We give them a little more time. That is our goal, to get people compliant. Working with people and working in the public interest is what government should do.”
For those landowners who won’t work with Larson and his staff, a motion is filed in Jefferson County Municipal Court to allow the county to perform the remedial work and then a lien is placed against the land.
“In some cases, after it’s cleaned up, the owner takes more of an interest in the property,” Larson said. “For the truly abandoned properties, sometimes they’re more marketable and if they’re sold, we’re able to recover our costs, and then we can apply those proceeds to take care of another problem.”
Larson said mitigating public nuisances is a correct use for ARPA money.
“ARPA is about public safety and trying to stimulate economic development,” he said.
“We’re going to use this money to clean up the worst of the worst of our neighborhoods. And once we get a problem area in one neighborhood cleaned up, a lot of times you see the other owners of not-as-bad homes clean up their properties. When that happens, you’ve turned around a whole neighborhood,” Larson said.