Condemnation process frustrates Cape council members

Dilapidated, vacant buildings have turned some Cape Girardeau city blocks into neighborhood eyesores and left City Council members frustrated over the lengthy condemnation process.

"The frustration is the amount of time it takes to get it done," Ward 4 Councilman Robbie Guard said Friday.

Several days earlier, the council voted to issue a tax bill in an effort to recover more than $7,000 in expenses for demolition of a rundown structure at 1418 N. Spanish St. and removal of weeds and trash on the property.

"It takes us 15 months to get to this," Guard said at the meeting.

According to city staff, the structure was condemned July 13, 2018.

The condemnation process takes at least 310 days from start to finish, city staff have said. The process includes notifications, inspections, a public hearing, advertising for bids and awarding a contract to raze a structure.

Ward 1 Councilman Daniel Presson said his Red Star neighborhood has a number of dilapidated houses and weed-filled properties.

"There is a lot of derelict property," he said at the council meeting.

Presson said the city needs to hold landlords accountable for maintaining rental properties. The city, he said, needs to address nuisances.

Soulful Harvest Ministries pastor Scott Johnson told the council landlords must be held accountable. "It just looks bad," he said of some of the boarded up and rundown buildings on the city's south side. "Some of the properties are just like junk."

Mayor Bob Fox advised the public to report dilapidated housing and property nuisances to the city government.

City manager Scott Meyer said tackling vacant and rundown properties can be costly.

Guard, however, said, "It is something that needs to be in the budget every year."

Guard said Friday he would prefer landlords fix up their rental properties rather than leave them to the city to tear them down. But the councilman said the city has no choice but to raze them when property owners won't maintain the structures.

"For the sake of health and safety, we have to tear them down," he said.

In fiscal 2019, which ended June 30, the city spent $35,600 to demolish deteriorated buildings, according to city finance director Victor Brownlees.

But the city recovers very little of that expense.

Last fiscal year, the city recovered $8,600 through tax billing, Brownlees wrote in an email to the Southeast Missourian.

The payments typically are for demolition occurring "some considerable time ago," he added.

The city had 13 condemned structures through the first nine months of this calendar year, development services director Alex McElroy said.

Four of those were torn down by the owners.

By the end of September, five structures had been demolished by the city and two more were listed under contract for demolition, McElroy said.

The city has incurred more than $40,000 in demolition and other expenses associated with those seven structures, according to McElroy.

In 2017, the Southeast Missourian reported the city razed 14 of 44 structures torn down over a four-year period. Property owners removed the other 30 structures, city records show.

Then-city finance director John Richbourg told the newspaper in August 2017 the city had spent more than $232,000 to demolish condemned buildings since fiscal 2011.

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