Chronic violators of the City’s blight/nuisance ordinance sparked a lengthy city council discussion Monday concerning how best to deal with them.
Currently, there are 35 properties in town that are considered past due with rectifying violations and nine that have been satisfied and are considered success stories of the clean-up project. This is out of a total of 53 targeted properties/ houses.
Required fixes ranged from shingles and siding, to paint, windows and even demolition.
Two structures — on 200 Union St. and 424 Rowland St. — have been deemed “beyond unliveable,” said Tracy City Administrator Jeff Carpenter.
Homeowners are given a six-month time frame to address the City’s concerns. City Attorney Matthew Gross said there are three ways to deal with abating housing conditions. There are two under City code. One is the City’s building code that deals with things like siding and windows; the other basis falls under the nuisance category (debris, junk, and abandoned cars). The third is under State statute concerning hazardous buildings, or structurally unsafe.
One question that surfaced Monday was how to pursue noncompliant residents — go through the city council, which can pass a resolution, ordering the homeowner again to fix the issue; or file a motion to the court to attain the right to go on the property and assess the cost of fixing or obtain a judgement against the property; that is roughly a three-month process, Gross said.
The other avenue the City can take is to cite the homeowner in a criminal fashion, a move Gross advises against.
“That process, there’s really no known timeframe,” he said. “A person may not appear in court, and nothing happens. Or, they request a trial, and that costs the City a lot more money because they’re afforded a public defender. The abatement process is a lot quicker. You can get an order much sooner than going through the criminal process. And then you have more control over the proceedings.”
Gross said Tracy Police is allowed to criminally cite under City code. Gross said the ideal situation would be for the City to approach the homeowner on their property and ask for permission to raze or remove a house — that would cut out having to get an order from the court. The costs would be assessed to the property. The City would not receive any payback on tax-forfeited homes.
“The ones that didn’t pay their citations and took it to court and lost their case, the judge ruled they had to pay a fine and then were given six months probation to clean up their mess,” Tracy Police Chief Jason Lichty said. “That allowed them six months to have a mess basically, because we couldn’t cite them again in that probation period.”
The City essentially has found itself walking a fine line between being fair to those on the fix-it list and cracking down on offenders.
“We’re not sitting here picking on any particular person, but we’re also getting some non-compliance,” Carpenter said. “Do we do the process here, do we make it more of a criminal thing? What do we want to do? We have people saying they’re on the list, but they don’t see other people on the list working. We try to be as respectful as we can, but we also have an obligation to the rest of the citizens, especially those in the neighborhoods (of offenders).”
Carpenter did acknowledge that there are people on the list that are working on addressing things the City has asked to be taken care of, “but we’re stalled a little bit.”
Carpenter added that the City has about $21,000 out of $50,000 budgeted funds left to spend for its clean-up program, and another $50,000 is budgeted for 2026. The City is allowed to use that money for court fees.
Carpenter said he wanted the council to be aware of “some of the roadblocks that we’ve run into. We are getting phone calls … they know we’re talking about it, they know we’re spending money on it — it just isn’t getting done quick enough. It’s not that we aren’t communicating with people, it’s just that we’re not getting very far with a few chronic (cases).”
Carpenter said the City is not totally against pursuing chronic offenders criminally, but would rather avoid going down that road.
In other business Monday …
• The council set a date of Sept. 8 at 5 p.m. for a preliminary budget meeting. The budget has to be certified by the end of September.
• The council learned that the City’s Local Government Aid total is higher than previously anticipated: $1,700.
• Public Works Director Shane Daniels reported that patching and overlay on the bike path will be competed by the end of this week.
