- May 8, 2024
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Code enforcement is supposed to be an impartial process: A call comes in — or a code enforcement officer see a violation on their rounds — they check it out, and they issue a warning if there’s a problem.
But it doesn’t always work that way.
Instead, code enforcement officers sometimes find themselves used as pawns in neighborhood disputes, with one neighbor calling in repeated anonymous complaints against another neighbor they don’t like.
F-section resident Deborah Susswein told the City Council at its regular meeting the evening of July 7 that she’s been the target of such a campaign, and asked the council to make a change: End the anonymous complaint system.
“I think that the anonymity makes for real problems,” she said. In her case, she said, “This neighbor, who I think is cowardly and I think he’s a sniper, he does this, and I know that other people who are making frivolous complaints and sniping can do this more readily, if their complaints are anonymous.”
The exact nature of the complaints against Susswein came out in later discussion between the council members when Councilwoman Heidi Shipley, who lives on the same street as Susswein, described the problem as a neighbor “sitting there during the rainy season, which is now, and they’re watching for that grass to hit the code,” then calling in a complaint about it being too long.
Susswein said her house, built before her neighbors’, is lower than others around it, which slows down her mowing because the ground’s often too wet. “What makes it difficult to mow when everybody else mows is that I get the Everglades,” she said. “My land is swamped, especially in the backyard.”
But City Manager Jim Landon warned that there was a reason for the anonymous code violation complaint system: People who’ve been complained about can retaliate, sometimes criminally, against complainers.
Code Enforcement Supervisor Barbara Grossman said complainers often refuse to give their names, and for good reason. “It can get really ugly,” she said. “I mean, to the fact of coming home and their windows have been cracked, spray painted fences — it’s just unbelievable.”
“I think, though, there’s two sides,” Councilman Steven Nobile interjected. “There’s that side, and then there’s the side of the neighbor using it as a weapon against their neighbors. … You’re giving me an excuse which I understand, but you’re not addressing the other side. I hear more of people getting abused by neighbors than I do of neighbors getting attacked because they complained.”
He proposed a potential solution: collecting names, but not making them public.
Protecting malicious complainers, but not their targets, he said, is “addressing half of it. And we seriously need to sit down and fix this, because it is happening a lot on both sides. ...We’ve got to protect both sides.”
Grossman said that sometimes code enforcement officers know they’re being misused.
“There’s many times that we know that here is another side to the story,” she said. “We know the situation. We know at that time that it’s going to be unfounded; it’s going not to be a code violation. Or we’ll get to the point where we’ll tell them, ‘There’s nothing in the code that says you can’t have cardboard hanging out your garage door, that’s a civil issue, you have to take that up with your neighbor.’ You know, if it’s not a violation, it’s not a violation.”
The city’s attorney, Bill Reischmann, reminded council members that a complaint doesn’t automatically trigger a violation notice or fine: It just starts a process of investigation.
“If the code enforcement officer receives, for the sake of argument, the 10th complaint on the same property from the same anonymous source in one month, they’re going to grab their investigator, and they’re going to use their common sense — and I see it happen — and if there’s not a code violation, that’s the end of it. If there is a code violation there’s a warning notice.”
“I understand that,” Nobile interjected, “but if somebody’s making 10 or 12 calls a month — and when the code enforcement officer goes out, there is no violation — that’s costing me money.”
“You bet it is,” Councilman Bill McGuire replied.
Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Mark Carman, head of the Sheriff’s Office’s Palm Coast precinct, said deputies have teamed up with code enforcement officers to determine if complainers aren’t reliable.
“I’m just using a for instance: Four or five times, somebody’s calling in a barking dog compliant,” he said. “And we’ve found it to be totally unfounded — deputies or code enforcement’s sat there, rolled down the windows, did their due diligence, sat down the road with their windows down, not just rolled by and didn’t hear them, but actually sat there for literally half an hour, an hour, and calls still came in — at which time we said, ‘Well, we’re no longer going to respond to anonymous calls to that house based on our discretion,’ and as Mr. Reischmann said, common sense. So that’s how we handle that.”
Shipley said there are cases when a complaint might be technically correct — as in the case of the neighbor waiting around for an enemy’s grass to hit code length during the rainy season — but only get reported because someone’s waiting for it to happen and then calling in the violation before their target has had a chance to fix it.
Grossman said her officers track the rain and wait for weekends before issuing notices, so people have a chance to mow when it’s dry. “There may be an individual when you’re driving up who says, ‘My lawnmower’s broke,’” she said. “We’ll give them reasonable time, and we’ll come back and do a re-inspection. The lawn is mowed, the case is over.”
McGuire turned the discussion away from Susswein’s case and back to anonymous complaints.
“The bigger issue here, if there is one, is that there are people who use our code enforcement department as a weapon against you — ‘I live next door to Carman, I don’t like Carman, so I’m going to invent all kinds of stuff to see if I can get him in trouble just because I don’t like him,’” he said.
The council directed Landon to schedule the issue for discussion at a workshop after Councilman Jason DeLorenzo said he’d considered some ways of addressing the problem, but thought the matter warranted more discussion.
“I think I have some ideas at how we could protect the citizens, but also try to reduce the number of frivolous or retaliatory calls,” DeLorenzo said. “I’ve been looking for what other communities do, and best practices and those types of items as part of the discussion, and probably the volume of repeat calls from citizens and that type of stuff, so we can understand if there really is a problem.”
