Inspection Team Takes Offensive in Fight Against Hazards, Blight

The stacked wooden pallets, rising above the South-Central landscape to the height of a three-story building, did not look especially illicit. But to the trained eyes of the city inspection team, they were a disaster waiting to happen.

“I wouldn’t want to be caught here in an earthquake,” said inspector Jon Sciberras. “If you drop a match, the whole place is going to go up.”

Moments later, the owner of the property had received a citation listing a series of building code violations.

The encounter between the Vernon Avenue property owner and the Department of Building and Safety officials was different from a run-of-the-mill inspection in several respects.

For starters, there was not just one inspector, but six, fanning out across the lot--all members of the Proactive Code Enforcement Team, concentrating on wiping out blight. And an assistant city attorney, Ted Smith III, stood nearby.

What’s more, the inspectors had gone out and found the violations themselves. By contrast, most city building inspectors will visit a property only after receiving a citizen’s complaint.

“We go neighborhood by neighborhood, door by door, block to block,” Smith said. “We look at the totality of a neighborhood.”

Working under a program created by the City Council last year as a pilot project, the inspectors troll for building violations in three Central City council districts, the 8th, 9th and 10th.

The team’s mandate is to go after a wide range of eyesores, everything from graffiti and illegal signs to tumbling walls and overgrown lawns.

The team has inspected more than 1,800 properties since February. The question of whether to continue the pilot project will be debated Friday before the City Council.

Working out of a city building near Vermont and Manchester avenues, the program is a one-stop shopping center of code enforcement in which two branches of city government--the city attorney’s office and the building department--cooperate to achieve results.

When property owners don’t comply with orders from the inspectors, they are called to a hearing with prosecutor Smith in which the potential consequences are made clear.

At one such hearing this month, Smith urged a South-Central homeowner to paint over the graffiti in the alley behind her home on East 49th Street.

“I’m a prosecutor,” Smith told the homeowner, his tone at once serious and nonthreatening. “What I’m trying to do is keep you out of the criminal court system.”

The owners agreed to paint over the graffiti.

Later, Smith joined the inspectors on visits to several locations in South-Central and the Crenshaw district, including a gutted business in a strip mall and an auto repair shop. The attorney’s presence at the inspections helps if a case ends up headed to court.

Inside one especially cluttered room in the repair shop, one of the inspectors found a set of exposed electrical wires not far from several barrels of fuel.

Senior inspector Bernard Anderson took in this information and decided to act. Most inspectors might give the owner several days to fix the hazardous conditions before issuing a citation. Not Anderson, who saw the situation as an imminent danger.

“We’ll give them what? An hour?” Anderson said.

“Forthwith,” Smith replied.

The inspectors have an average of 13 years’ experience each with Building and Safety. Anderson said working with the team is an especially rewarding assignment.

“We’ve bumped heads as far as the way the department typically issues and enforces orders to comply,” Anderson said. “We get exposed to a lot of stuff that most inspectors don’t get exposed to.”