""Residents live every day with the consequences of absentee property owners who refuse to maintain their problems," District 5 City Councilmember Peter Ortiz said. "These sites have ultimately become magnets for overgrown vegetation, illegal dumping, encampments, trespassing (and) most recently, fires, graffiti and crime. They consume a disproportionate amount of our city's time, resources and taxpayer dollars to monitor, remediate and enforce compliance. Our residents should not be forced to carry the cost of someone else's negligence.""
""Under the city's former rules, it could assign penalties of up to $2,500 per day and a total of $100,000, but despite it exhausting those remedies, that was not enough to force Z&L Properties - the disgraced developer that had promised to restore and preserve it when it purchased the site in 2017 - to address the eyesore. Now the city is fining five times as much and up to $20,000 a day.""
San José is substantially increasing penalties for chronic property-code violations, with total fines now reaching up to $500,000 and daily fines increased up to $20,000. The city seeks to compel absentee or negligent property owners to remedy blighted sites that attract overgrown vegetation, illegal dumping, encampments, trespassing, fires, graffiti and crime. A majority of violators have voluntarily complied, but several high-profile cases show the previous fine structure — up to $2,500 per day and $100,000 total — lacked sufficient leverage to force remediation. City enforcement includes compliance orders outlining violations, required corrective steps and potential penalties to secure remediation.
Read at The Mercury News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]