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During the Sep. 10 work session, the LaGrange mayor and council received an update on code enforcement from the LaGrange Police Department.

Lt. Clayton Bryant, who has overseen Code Enforcement since April, provided an update on the ongoing efforts by the department.

Code Enforcement has two divisions: the Environmental Division, which deals with trash, overgrown and unsightly growth, and other health hazards, and the division that deals with nuisance abatement and unsafe structures.

Bryant said one of the things they are hoping to improve soon is their tracking of compliance issues. He said previously, the department was primarily tracking things via paper and handwritten notices. Often, when they needed to research a particular location’s history, it could take hours.

“That’s been one of the big things we’ve tried to correct moving forward,” Bryant said. “We’ve got a new records management system coming in that we hope it’s going to integrate with the police department.”

Bryant said when he took over the department, they had around 500 houses that were targeted as possibly unsafe or a nuisance based on windshield study where code enforcement visually inspects homes from the road as they ride by. That list was then narrowed down to around 60 that were considered higher priority for further inspection.

By the time code enforcement was able to go to those homes, many had been repaired, but from the 30 to 40 left. That number was even further narrowed to around 20 to 25 homes that were targeted for potentially tearing down or other abatement based on the department’s budget.

“Our goal is to try to get somewhere between two and four per month. We’ve torn down eight since April, but in the last 90 days, five, specifically. We have 16 active targets, which means they are in some stage of the procurement process, whether that be title searches, administrative search warrants,” Bryant said.

Bryant said they do what they can with the money they have because demolishing a home can be expensive.

“A 1200-square-foot mill-village house with asbestos shingles cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $27 to $30,000 to tear down,” Bryant explained.

On the environmental side, over the last 90 days, the department issued 319 notices of violations, each of which could have multiple complaints. The homeowner or resident is then given a timeframe to bring the property into compliance, which Bryant says requires a lot of follow-up and tracking.

“We don’t just go out and write citations on the very first time we see the issue. We try to work with them,” Bryant said.

Bryant said most of the issues are discovered by officers being proactive and addressing issues. He said of the 319 notices, only 28 came from citizen complaints.