Anti-Blight Update Seeks To Raise Fines, Drop Certified Mail

A change to the type of mail used by the city to notify landlords of blight violations might soon make it harder for landlords to dodge fines for dilapidated properties — as part of a broader suite of anti-blight updates that would also see those fines rise to up to $1,000 per day.

Those proposed adjustments to the city’s blight code are two of several housing enforcement changes encompassed in three ordinance amendments now under review by the Board of Alders. (The Board of Alders Legislation Committee will hold a public hearing on these ordinance changes on Tuesday, June 10, in the aldermanic chamber at 6 p.m.)

The proposed amendments are part of a broader project to streamline and strengthen the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city agency in charge of housing- and blight-code enforcement. Under Director Liam Brennan, LCI has been overhauling its enforcement systems to raise the stakes for landlords who have been inclined to ignore city fines regarding unsafe or unsightly housing conditions. 

One reform might appear, on its surface, to be a small change: using first-class mail — or even email — instead of certified mail to notify landlords that the city has found violations at their properties. 

But according to Brennan, this tweak will remove a significant roadblock that the department has faced in getting landlords to comply with the blight code.

One part of LCI’s role in the city is enforcing the city’s housing code — a set of regulations that are primarily designed to ensure safe living conditions inside a tenant’s apartment, such as working heating, operational smoke detectors, and pest mitigation. 

The agency is also tasked with enforcing the city’s blight code, which generally governs the externally visible parts of both residential and commercial buildings. Blight violations can range in severity from aesthetic infractions, such as graffiti or overgrown shrubs, to health and safety concerns, such as trash heaps, broken windows, and fire hazards. 

LCI is required to notify property owners of any such violations discovered on their properties before imposing any fines; landlords have 10 days to address blight violations once they are notified, for example. 

Prior to Brennan’s appointment to lead LCI in July 2024, LCI would send out all of these notifications by way of certified mail, requiring the property owners to sign as confirmation that they received the notice. But according to Brennan, that system left a loophole for some landlords to either intentionally or unintentionally evade LCI enforcement. As he told the City Plan Commission in May, LCI has encountered cases in which ​“the landlord is refusing to sign the certified mail, so is evading that way.” Or cases in which a P.O. box is listed as the property owner’s address, leaving no way to obtain a signature. Or cases in which ​“the landlord has disappeared into the ether,” and cannot be located in the first place, as Brennan put it. ​“That becomes a real problem.”

Brennan keeps a running list of at least 18 properties for which he said the certified mail requirement is currently impeding anti-blight enforcement, including several in the Hill and several in Cedar Hill.

The city’s blight code ordinance specifies that these notices must be sent out by certified mail, while the housing code ordinance does not. So while Brennan has already implemented a policy of notifying landlords of housing code violations by first-class mail rather than certified mail, he must go through the Board of Alders to make the same change in the blight enforcement system. 

Under Brennan’s proposed ordinance amendment, LCI would be able to start the ten-day response timeline for blight violations — and, if the violations are not addressed, eventually levy a fine — once the notice is delivered, no signature required.

The amendment also allows LCI to send such notices by email ​“if the owner has provided an email address to the Livable City Initiative.”

Also contained in Brennan’s proposed ordinance amendment is language clarifying that the city can impose fines for each ongoing blight violation of ​“up to the maximum listed in C.G.S. § 7 – 148(7)(H)(xv),” as opposed to the current practice of fining $100 per day. 

That state law, as of an update in 2024, dictates a variety of blight fine maximums depending on the size and purpose of the property in question. For instance, the state allows the city to fine a residential building with fewer than seven apartments up to $250 per blight violation, per day, — or up to $1,000 per violation, per day, if the violation in question has been found two other times at the property within the prior year. The state also allows a maximum fine for larger residential buildings and commercial properties of 10 to 12 cents for every square foot per violation, per day. Brennan’s amendment would directly enable the city to take advantage of these state-enabled powers to impose the higher fines.

Brennan argued that higher fines are necessary because many property owners have the wealth to simply write off the city’s current $100-per-day blight fines. He pointed to the dilapidated former nursing home at 240 Winthrop Ave. as an example of how these fines can be ineffective. ​“We’ve got a blight fine out on it for $100 a day” that has accrued to $103,000, as of May 28, he said. But ​“because the property is worth so much,” those fines will ​“never be effective.”

“There are some extremely large and extremely problematic properties for certain districts of our city,” he told the City Plan Commission in May. ​“For some, $100 a day or $150 a day is really just a drop in the bucket.

He emphasized that blight fines are not necessarily going to be imposed at the maximum level in every case, as they are ​“up to the discretion” of LCI officials (and, if the property owner appeals, a volunteer hearing officer).

In an interview on Monday, local landlord Wendell Matthew Harp lambasted both proposed changes as unfair. Harp recently faced nearly $20,000 in blight fines imposed on some his own properties after appealing through a hearing officer. 

For one, Harp argued, blight violations aren’t always the landlord’s fault — so the escalating fines, in his view, are not a fair default response. ​“If you have trash in the backyard, if you pick up trash every week and someone keeps dumping it there, that’s ultimately not on the landlord,” Harp said. 

“These are revenue-producing measures,” he said. ​“And that’s fine, but call them what they are. Don’t hide behind the idea of saying, ​‘We want to protect people.’ ”

He argued that the city should actually make the required repairs on landlords’ properties, and then charge the landlord for the repair costs, rather than charging fines. 

Harp echoed Brennan’s assessment that removing the certified mail requirement would make it faster and easier for the city to fine landlords for blight — but he doesn’t see that as a good thing. ​“When has government speeding up a process to penalize people ever been a good thing?” he asked rhetorically. 

“The powerful,” he said, ​“want to remove obstacles against people who don’t have as much power.”