City of Greeley could soon hire another code compliance officer to keep up with complaints, violations

By Kelly Ragan

The City of Greeley could soon hire another code compliance officer to help keep up with complaints and violations.

At a city council work session Tuesday, interim Community Development Director Becky Safarik recommended the city hire another code compliance officer in 2022.

The suggestion was made in response to city council’s discussion earlier this year on changing occupancy limits.

As it stands, Greeley is a U+1 city, meaning Residential-Low Density or Residential-Medium Density areas (think suburbs rather than college houses or apartments) a resident can have one unrelated person living with them.

At one point, council discussed changing the occupancy limits to essentially tie the number of unrelated people allowed to live together to the number of bedrooms in the home in Residential Low-Density and Residential Medium-Density areas.  

But as council discussed changing the limits, which have been in place for 40 years, a common critique emerged: how could the city consider making changes if it couldn’t keep up with current complaints or existing problem properties?

Several folks who participated in public comment at a planning commission meeting recounted horror stories of houses in their own neighborhoods being occupied by more people than allowed by code, creating problems with trash, parking, noise complaints, drug use and more. 

“(These changes would) put an undue burden on (residential-low density) zones,” one speaker said. “For those of us who have lived in these zones for 40 years, that is unfair.” 

Another speaker said after so many houses were foreclosed on and bought up by investors around the Cranford and Fairacres neighborhoods in 2005, she’s seen problems personally. 

“Unscrupulous people bought these houses for almost nothing and rented out these bedrooms,” she said. 

Planning Commissioner Erik Briscoe, director of business development for Continuum Health Management, said during a previous meeting that he was concerned that relaxing restrictions on housing occupancy would weaken the city’s already meager ability to enforce the code. 

“We’d be taking away the seemingly toothless enforcement and pulling even more teeth,” Briscoe said. 

Briscoe said that people who seek to live in areas zoned for residential low-density housing expect that they can keep that neighborhood character when they make what is often the biggest investment of their lives. Changing that rule now could create “retroactive disappointment” in their neighborhoods, he said. 

Councilmember Kristen Zasada, who did not seek re-election this year, echoed Briscoe’s concerns at a previous city council meeting.

“There are very few tools already available to enforce this,” Zasada said. “I would hate to take away that resource in our city.” 

So, what would it look like to give the code compliance department more teeth?

Additional staff

For starters, according to city staff, that means hiring another officer.

According to the city, the code compliance staff – made up of one supervisor, and five compliance inspectors – hasn’t increased despite Greeley’s population growth and the physical expansion of the city. COVID-19 furloughs and staff turnover has made that more complicated, but according to the numbers, code compliance had their hands full even without staffing issues.

The city sees on average between 3,000-4,000 code compliance cases per year, according to the city. 

Those cases, say 3,500, are divided between the five inspectors, meaning each takes on about 700 cases each year. That translates to 58 cases per month per officer, with about three hours spent on each case.

“The math is simple but demonstrates the inevitable decline in coverage the code officers can be expected to perform in routine work and the lessening capacity to address property conditions in a proactive manner,” according to the city.

City staff also recommended setting higher fines, or different fines, for properties that require significant resources.

Safarik said during the work session Tuesday that most property owners make the necessary changes when the city sends a courtesy warning.

This could include reviewing and minimum fines for repeated violations, lowering the threshold for properties to be considered public nuisance properties, considering a policy to determine when to issue daily violation for non-compliance, and drafting a code amendment to create a function for restitution payments.

Because this was a work session, council didn’t vote on the matter – but it did give city staff the green light to pursue these options.