The head of Burlington’s code enforcement staff has assured the city’s leaders that, over the past four years or so, he and his colleagues have erected a sturdy foundation for the city’s operations against substandard homes.
Chris Marland, Burlington’s chief code enforcement officer, shared this upbeat assessment during a lengthy conversation with Burlington’s city council on Monday.
During a regularly-scheduled work session that evening, Marland recalled that the city rejiggered its procedures for code enforcement in 2020 in order to make the process more proactive. He noted that, as part of this overhaul, minimum housing cases are also no longer submitted to an appointed committee but administered directly by the code enforcement staff.
Marland added that, since March of 2020, code enforcement has taken on 128 cases – mostly in response to citizen complaints rather than his staff’s own investigations.
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“Of those, we have 29 that are still active,” he said. “Most of those are newer cases…We probably only have two or three that we’re dealing with that are of an extreme nature.”
Marland identified two fire-damaged homes at 1523 Maple Avenue and 2608 Amherst Court as two of his division’s current sticking points. He added that the latter has since been sold, and he acknowledged the new owner apparently wants to repair the dwelling. Marland conceded that fire-ravaged homes “these do take quite a bit of time” to repair or demolish due to the intercession of insurance companies.
Marland’s report seemed to strike a chord with Burlington’s mayor Jim Butler.
“This is the one area where I probably get the most routine community feedback,” Butler admitted. “When these go on for a while, people quite frankly blame us…and this is going to be a key piece to continually improving our community.”
Butler added that his primary concern has been rental property owners who aren’t meeting their responsibilities to tenants. Marland said that he and his colleagues try to foster a constructive response from these would-be slumlords – not only with the structure under investigation but also with other dwellings they own that aren’t quite up to code.
