264 Loveland Heights Homeowners Face Minor Misdemeanor Charge
by David MillerLOVELAND, OHIO - Loveland residents should be wary when City Hall tells you they are coming to your neighborhood to hear all about how they can serve you better. Last fall they came to Wall Street and announced that a sight impaired neighbor would like a grassy strip between the street and the sidewalks. At the Neighborhood Meeting, organized by the City, they unveiled plans and announced they would fix everything by taking away all of the on-street parking and would be sowing some grass. What was really sown was fear over property value decline and drastic lifestyle changes. Self interest started to sink in; a natural reaction as each homeowner had different circumstances, some never using the street parking in the first place, some depending on it every day. Animosity between neighbors, even within households, was sown. Lines were drawn, sides taken. City Manager Tom Carroll and City Engineer Cindy Klopfenstein inferred those who opposed their surprise plan did not know what was best for them, and even worse - not caring about their sight impaired neighbor. Of course, as in any neighborhood in the City, these insinuations couldn’t be any further from the truth.
Last fall, the City also took their neighborhood show to the Loveland Heights neighborhood. Carroll later reported that while there, he heard a resident complain about the condition of some sidewalks. Back at City Hall, Carroll ordered immediate inspections, sending Klopfenstein walking the neighborhood last fall with a cans of spray paint. He was duty bound he says to enforce the code when he was notified of violations. He wasn’t of course notified of a specific violation, just a generic complaint.
On March 15, in spite of the specific instructions by City Council, and contrary to assurances he gave to them that he would not - Carroll unilaterally sent “Notice of Violation” letters to 264 Loveland Heights homeowners, telling them to either fix the sidewalks themselves or the city will do it for them.
Unprecedented: 264 Minor Misdemeanor charges
This move was unprecedented in the history of our community - to take a generic complaint about home up-keep and turn it into 264 Minor Misdemeanor charges. Unprecedented in any fashion, but 264 Minor Misdemeanor charges leveled against a working class, blue collar neighborhood, during the most severe recession most have seen in their lifetime. Most homeowners face bills under $300, however many repairs are $400, $500, $1,000. One homeowner faces more than $3,000 of code violations.
Homeowners were given four options:
1 - Fix the sidewalks themselves turning in the cost of sakrete and lumber to the City and receive fifty percent back from a fund the City has for such purposes.
2 - Secure two quotes from bonded sidewalk contractors, get approval to proceed, and turn in the bill receiving the fifty percent rebate from the City.
3 - Let a City hired contractor do the work. The City told homeowners that they will not know what this price will be until after April 27, and the fifty percent rebate would not apply. If they so choose, the total unknown cost of the work plus a ten percent “administrative fee” would be assessed against the home. The homeowner would pay Hamilton County over three years. Each year Hamilton County would send Loveland a check.
4 - Appeal the need for the repairs, before a City Sidewalk Appeal Board. Residents of the Heights will not be appointed to this appeals board.
Many homeowners were cited if their driveway aprons were not up to par, however the homeowner cannot use the rebate program for this repair or choose to let the City do the repairs and assess them for it. The apron violations are not appealable to the City Sidewalk Appeal Board, but would have to be taken to the Loveland Board of Zoning Appeals and pay a $100 filing fee. The “Notice of Violation” did not mention this fact at all.
Homeowners were given twenty-four days to decide what they wanted to do. If the City heard nothing from them by April 9, option #3 by default kicks in, and the City would do the repair.
Klopfenstein estimated that it will cost $111,000 to repair the 17,300 sq. ft. of sidewalk she marked with spray paint. The remainder of the Heights, Stoneybrook, and Miamiview Drive, will be inspected later this year. The program moves to other Loveland neighborhoods in later years.
Sorry, We’re Out of Bobbleheads
Council has only budgeted $10,000 for the reimbursement program for this year, a line item that could balloon to $55,000 if all the residents turned in bills to the City. Also, under the reimbursement program, the homeowners could choose to repair all of their sidewalk, not just those pads that the City has ordered them to repair, potentially making this figure much higher.
Missing from the letter to the homeowners was any reference to Carroll's plan to change the sidewalk ordinance to limit the 50/50 program to whatever the City had budgeted - currently $10,000. In essence it was going to be first come first served until the money ran out. Carroll put this never before seen ordinance change on the March 23 Council Agenda and asked Council to pass it.
Councilman Paul Elliott says this is akin to advertising a Boblehead Day at the ball park, and failing to tell people that there is only a limited number. You only find this out after you buy tickets and show up at the gate with your children. Elliott said he thought it “incredibly important” that the homeowners should have been told this.
Of course the Bobblehead comparison goes beyond the limited number of dolls, looking at the oversized head of the program favoring City Hall, and the moving target of specifics.
Other mid-inning changes Carroll wanted, would limit the reimbursement program to fifty percent of the bulk bid price the City was going to seek. So, a homeowner who only needs one section of repair, would now only be reimbursed based on a bid based on what the contractor said they would repair hundreds of sections at a time.
In addition, the City has 0.00’s budgeted for the $111,000 they will need if all of the homeowners choose to let the City hired contractor do all of the work. The City will need to pay the contractor when the work is completed, yet won’t start getting any of this money back (one-third per-year) until homeowners pay next year’s tax bill. This figure could also balloon if homeowners choose to let the City’s contractor repair more sidewalk sections than those cited by Klopfenstein.
As with the Wall Street surprise, Carroll and Klopfenstein are now entrenched defending their program. They have pride in the plan they spent months sweating over. They are in disbelief that homeowners and city council aren’t downright grateful for their caring and help. Their egos won’t let them back down, and Carroll painted City council in a corner by sending the violation orders prematurely. It should be noted that the “Notice of Violation” letters were sent by regular U.S. mail, not up to snuff by regular standards of legally notifying someone they face code and property maintenance violations subject to the penalty of a minor misdemeanor. Normally a Certified letter would be delivered, requiring proof that the homeowner had received it.
Homeowners who received the notices that City Council instructed Carroll not to send, were invited to meeting at City Hall on March 25 to discuss their sidewalks. Both Carroll and Klopfenstein struggled to explain the program they had created within the vacuum of City Hall. It became clear they themselves did not have all of the kinks worked out when Carroll told the homeowners, “I’m sorry you’re the guinea pigs for this program.”
We may not like it, but let’s just keep moving
At the March 23 council meeting, Councilmember David Bednar said, “We’re into this, we’ve moved along. We’ve done our due diligence, and we’re at the point now that perhaps the methodology or the system wasn’t correct this time, but after this time, Mrs. Klopfenstein and staff can go back and reassess it, because this is the first time we have taken on a project of this magnitude in any of the neighborhoods in the city. Obviously it starts with the oldest neighborhood which probably has the most problems. So, moving forward we’ll know how to do it better next time. We may not like the mythology that happened, but we’re there - lets just keep moving.”
Why target the Heights and change the rules
All residents of the City have been eligible for, and taken advantage of the sidewalk reimbursement program for decades. It wasn’t until Tom Carroll targeted the Loveland Heights neighborhood for mass violation orders that he said the rules should be changed in the middle of his Bobblehead Game.
Why the Heights? Tom Carroll said it is because that is where he received the complaint. He also insists it is fair to go into the oldest neighborhoods first in what will eventually be a city-wide enforcement. Yet, the Heights, is by no stretch of anyone’s imagination but his, Loveland’s oldest neighborhood.
Council members, Linda Cox, Paul Elliott, and Mark Fitzgerald voted on March 9 to go no further with Carroll’s program until they could get more feedback from homeowners. Cox wanted to receive feedback from the residents on “affordability. ”Their votes prevailed, however Carroll went ahead and mailed the violation letters on March 15.
Also of note is that even though Carroll says he is duty bound to do something when code violations are pointed out, nothing will be done when needed concrete repairs in the Heights are the responsibility of City Hall. Klopfenstein showed a photo at the last council meeting of a driveway apron that would need to be replaced. The photo also revealed a broken concrete storm gutter in front of the driveway apron. Councilman David Bednar asked her if the City was going to fix the gutter. When Klopfenstein said “gutters are done as we do a road rehab program” Bednar dropped the subject.
They were pretty irate with me
Klopfenstein says she has received about fifty-six telephone calls from residents since the letters went out. The first two days she said were “pretty rough.” She received about a dozen calls each day. “Half of them aggravated. Thought this was horrible timing. Basically pretty irate with me.” She said that some callers said that their neighbor’s sidewalk was in worse shape than their own. She said she has had to do a lot of “hand-holding” as she talked the homeowners through the process, and said residents do not know which application to fill out and on what dates they need to be turned in. She described how thirteen of the callers said they couldn’t see the paint on the sidewalk. Klopfenstein said two homeowners got violation letters, but their sidewalks had never been painted at all. She corrected this by making a second visit to paint the sidewalks. Fourteen people called Klopfenstein telling her they “flat couldn’t afford it” and they were “very mad” about the City enforcing the code.
At the public meeting held last week, Carroll said the residents should expect to pay between $100 and $130 per sidewalk section. Residents responded that they were getting estimates between $150 and $200 per-section. One resident said he had been unemployed this year, but was now back to work. He said he had hoped his federal income tax refund check would allow him to catch up on some bills, “But I guess now it will go towards my sidewalks.”
Councilman Brent Zuch, a mortgage lender says that what the City is offering residents through the assessment program (plus 10% administration fee) would be an “interest free loan” paid back over three years. Fitzgerald counters that he assumed it wouldn’t be interest free because it was his assumption that the administrative fee included the cost of the loan the City would carry to pay the contractor. “I never presumed that on the assessment program that it was interest free. I would have assumed, and perhaps incorrectly, that the cost of carry would have been calculated into the assessment.”
Zuch adds, “This could be a mini stimulus here in Loveland. It is work.”
Speaking about only having $10,000 in the reimbursement fund, Zuch said, “I know the budget well enough and I’m pretty confidant we will come up with the funding. We’re not going to catch someone on a technicality and say, sorry you were the last one in line.”
“I mean, come on, that’s silly. We’re not going to let that happen. We’re just not. I mean frankly, if you have a few hundred dollars added as an assessment over three years it’s not going to be noticed immediately and it’s not going to be felt particularity hard. Sure we’d all rather have the money than spend it, but the reality is, this is for the good of all of Loveland and that entire neighborhood.”
Zuch says he originally proposed the idea to have the 50/50 program apply, whether the homeowner did the work themselves or the City contractor did the work. Elliott has made that proposal also. Zuch is now backing away from the idea saying, "This approach could easily blow a $100,000 plus hole in an already tight budget - all of this at a time when we are desperately trying to find more money to put into the city's park system. I have reconsidered this idea as not feasible because I cannot find a corresponding cut in the budget to pay for this and because I'm not sure it's appropriate to take all taxpayers dollars to pay for a specific area's benefit.”
At the public meeting on March 23, Fitzgerald said that while he appreciated the effort city staff had put into the sidewalk issue, it was council’s role to speak on behalf of residents and ensure their interests were protected from the bureaucrats.
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