On any given day, Joe Pizzo can
see drug dealers and prostitutes hanging out on Lyell Avenue near his bar, Smokin Joe’s. “We call it ‘Lyell
vision,'” laughs Pizzo mirthlessly. At 52, Pizzo, a Rochester
native, has seen it all. “There are so many problems,” he says. “How do you
address all these problems?”
Pizzo commends his area’s
Neighborhood Empowerment Team — one part neighborhood advocate, one part law
enforcement — for undertaking what he says is a thankless job. “They go
knocking on doors and say: ‘We know you’ve got drugs in here. We’ve gotten
numerous complaints that this is a drug house, and we suggest you shut down and
move.’ Sometimes they don’t care. Sometimes they get scared and go across the
street.”
His attitude toward NET is gentle, even pitying. “NET isn’t
supposed to stop prostitution. NET is supposed to try to keep people’s
[properties] up to code.”
Pizzo didn’t always feel so kindly
toward NET. In fact, several years ago, he almost ran inspectors out of his bar
for trying to fine him for hanging up too many neon signs. Under city codes,
signs can cover no more than 25 percent of a store window. Pizzo
said he pointed out that his signs didn’t block more than the allotted amount
when lumped together. He expected an outburst from the inspector. Instead, the
man mulled a minute and said, “You’re right.”
“He was reasonable,” Pizzo says.
In some ways, Pizzo’s experience
with NET exemplifies what former Mayor Bill Johnson hoped to accomplish when he
introduced the program almost a decade ago. NET staff were
meant to forge links with residents, storeowners, and neighborhood associations
in individual sections of the city. The Johnson administration hoped to empower
residents to fix their neighborhoods from within. The city set up six Rochester
NET offices, whose staff include code enforcement
officials, police officers, and an administrator.
Ultimately, the city hoped that each NET satellite would
work to proactively reduce problems such as property abandonment and blight
before they spiraled out of control. “NET was sold to the public as a silver
bullet,” recalls Mitch Rowe, a former NET administrator.
As the years have
passed, however, the program began to buckle under the weight of its own
hefty endeavor. “They were going to be the mini City Hall in the neighborhood,”
says Joan Roby-Davison, executive director of the 14621 neighborhood organization.
But it was soon clear that the goal was too ambitious. “We weren’t set up to
fail, but there was an expectation that we were never going to meet,” says
Mitch Rowe.
NET also became increasingly controversial, with people
charging that some NET staff had grown aggressive, even hostile, toward the
constituents they were meant to serve. People in situations similar to Pizzo’s complained that inspectors and enforcement officers
often bullied them into compliance. Roby-Davison said she’s seen such adversarial
encounters firsthand.
“There’s sometimes really aggressive enforcement,” she says.
“And sometimes we really like aggressive enforcement — but sometimes it’s
odd. I keep talking to people who keep getting ticketed for things that make no
sense whatsoever.” For example, NET staff can issue citations for just about
any infraction that mars the urban landscape: garbage left out too long, rusty
gutters, unkempt lawns. The problem, says Roby-Davison, is that some residents
get fined for failing to tidy up their yard, while their neighbor gets off
scot-free.
While some remain loyal to NET, others have come to despise
the program, says former City Council member Tim Mains. “I heard horror
stories,” he says. “What we wanted it to accomplish, the reason that we created
it in the first place, is that it would be an extension of Neighbors Building
Neighborhoods,” a city program that unites residents, businesses, schools, and
religious groups to address each city sector’s unique needs. “Instead,” says
Mains, “in some places, I think people feel like it’s more like the
Neighborhood Enforcement Team, not the Neighborhood Empowerment Team.”
Prompted by numerous
complaints, Mains asked that the city analyze the program. The result is a
report by the Center for Governmental Research, a draft copy of which City
Newspaper recently received. The program’s difficulties, CGR concluded, include
vague goals, weak data analysis, and inconsistent enforcement. New Deputy Mayor
Patricia Malgieri says city officials will meet
sometime this week to determine the next step.
CGR says the city has four options: keep the current NET
structure, keep it but move inspection and enforcement back to City Hall, have
NET report to a city department rather than the mayor, or dismantle NET
altogether.
Malgieri — who is the former
head of CGR — says she believes the new administration will try to act
quickly on the report’s recommendations. “I know what the issues are, and I
know how important it is that we make NET an important part of our agenda going
forward,” she says. But, she stresses, the administration has no plans to
dissolve NET. Proposals, she says, “may involve changes in the way NET is
designed or implemented, but that has yet to be determined.”
While the mayor can move unilaterally on many of those
changes, City Council President Lois Giess says
Council members may have to approve specific items within the legislation. She
says she also thinks Council will take a serious look at NET when it, along
with all city programs, comes up for budget review in late spring. NET costs
the city about $8 million a year; but, even if the program were restructured,
most of its costs would remain. The city would still have to conduct
inspections and enforce codes, and that has been the bulk of NET’s work.
Although NET has
fallen into disfavor in recent years, for every horror story, there seems
to be an equally compelling success story — a realization that prompted CGR
to call its research “a study of contrasts.”
Charlotte Thomas, owner of Sensuous Satiables
and president of the Thurston Brooks Merchants Association, raves about her NET
office, noting that NET representatives attend every merchants meeting. NET
staff even helped her hang decorations while conducting a routine inspection
recently, she says.
Similarly, 19th Ward Community Association office manager
Marian Boutet says NET officials keep a close watch
on her neighborhood, which increases residents’ sense of belonging and
security. “They know the area, they know who the players are, they know who the
gangs are,” she says. “They know the neighborhood and who’s supposed to be here
and not.”
Those who dislike NET are too busy focusing on the
negatives, she says: “People tend to remember what didn’t work right. That’s definitely
a universal thing. People are fast to criticize and slow to praise. I don’t
think that’s any different from NET than any other entity.”
Roby-Davison, while less enthusiastic
about NET in practice, remains committed to the concept of NET as a group of
mini-City Halls. “It’s really a dilemma for me,” she says, “because I
was one of the initial supporters of NET.” Roby-Davison would like to see NET
staff take a more proactive approach to solving problems, such as property
abandonment and blight.
CGR’s research indicates that NET
was highly regarded during its formative years. “Most respondents believe that
NET had the biggest impact in its first two or three years.”
“Because the model of locating city staff in neighborhoods
was new, and the need for this type of city/community collaborative effort was
so great, there were many opportunities to make positive changes,” says the
report.
Some of the shift in attitude may be due to what the program has come to symbolize. “NET is a
microcosm of all the pressures and challenges facing city government,” CGR
wrote, noting that at least part of the reason NET has become all things to all
people is due to its amorphous mission statement:
“NET was created to support safe, clean, strong, viable, and
attractive neighborhoods by locating city code inspection and enforcement and
neighborhood policing services in neighborhoods so that city staff and
residents could work as a team to improve the quality of life by reducing urban
blight, nuisance and criminal activities.”
But that statement says little about how to measure such
reductions. And the city’s statistics have typically measured processes, not
outcomes, CGR staff wrote: “It is far easier to measure the number of tickets
issued, abandoned cars towed, properties boarded, than it is to measure whether
or not these actions have cumulatively made a difference in the quality of
life, when there are so many other variables that also affect the quality of
life.”
What is clear, though, is that almost all the problems facing
the city when NET began remain today. “Despite the many successes of NET over
the years, that need is just as great at the end of 2005 as it was when NET
started in 1997,” reported CGR staff. The report recommends that the city
“create a process to develop a realistic set of expectations about what
services the city can provide to support safe, clean, strong, viable,
attractive neighborhoods.”
NET’s real decline probably began in 2002,
when officials put code inspectors in charge of enforcement. The same office
became responsible for both citing violations and mandating compliance.
Although the new system seemed more efficient, CGR concluded that integrating
the two functions eliminated vital checks and balances between the two
departments.
Many complaints, such as those received by Mains’ office,
arose following that decision, with people alleging that NET officers were
using aggressive tactics to force compliance. More recently, several business
owners have harshly criticized officials for beefing up a Certificate of Use
policy requiring many small business owners to register with the city. Business
owners pay a $100 licensing fee and undergo background checks. The city’s goal
was make it easier to deal with problem businesses, such as those doubling as drug
fronts. As with many code-related activities, the job of administering C of U
fell upon NET administrators.
To some extent, many small-business owners’ criticism of the
C of U reflects how easy it is to scapegoat NET staff for an unpopular city
policy. But Bill Nielsen, owner of Chester Cab Pizza on Park Avenue
and Sticky Lips BBQ on Culver Road,
says he is angered both by the new C of U policy and by NET staff, who, he
says, have harassed and even threatened noncompliant owners.
For example, business owners who refuse to pay the $100
registration fee are ticketed $300, an amount that jumps to $600 after seven
days. “I mean, even a parking ticket you’ve got 30 days [to pay],” says
Nielsen. “You feel like a criminal.”
Nielsen grew so irate that he eventually posted this
eyebrow-raising sign on the front of Sticky Lips: “Rochester’s
NET office uses similar laws and tactics as Nazi Germany. The NET must be
stopped.” (“I never called them Nazi Germans,” says Nielsen. “I just said they
used similar laws and tactics.”)
However, other business owners — typically those in more
depressed areas — defend both the C of U and NET. “The C of U is in place to
help prevent businesses from being just fly-by-night,” says Charlotte Thomas of
Sensuous Satiables, noting that few things hurt
business more than nearby illegal activity or violence. Those interviewed for
this article echoed Thomas, noting that perhaps businesses on Park and Monroe
Avenues don’t face the same problems as their less affluent neighbors. “I talked
to a restaurant owner who said, yeah, $100 was a lot of money, but that
business down the street was a lot of money, too,” says Roby-Davison.
While she supports the C of U policy, Roby-Davison remains
less convinced about NET staff’s enforcement tactics. Her main concern is that
multiple tickets will eventually prompt landlords to abandon their properties
and business owners to close shop. Nielsen agrees. “What’s the percentage of
businesses that go out of business? It’s a high mortality rate,” he says. “That
means there’s got to be a whole lot of businesses that are on the brink.”
CGR shares that concern. In its report, CGR suggests that
the city conduct a separate analysis to determine if its efforts are indeed
counter-productive to growth: “anecdotal evidence suggests that city
enforcement policies may, in fact, be a major contributing factor to the high
number of vacant structures in the city,” says the report.
CGR concluded that hostile interactions between NET staff
and city residents arise, in part, because NET officials are not properly
trained. ” … NET civilian employees whose jobs put them in constant one-on-one
situations that require conflict resolution skills in the field should receive
specialized training, similar to or the same as conflict resolution training
received by RPD officers,” CGR advised.
The research group also strongly recommended splitting code
enforcement and inspection responsibilities. In a worst-case scenario, one
inappropriate action can escalate until the city must foreclose on a legitimate
property, CGR warned.
Adding to the problem is that NET staff’s workload has been increasing, but the workforce has not.
Many new or strengthened city initiatives, such as the C of U and a more
stringent noise ordinance, fall under NET’s
jurisdiction. NET staff suffer from higher turnover and burnout rates than
other city officials, says the CGR report.
NET staff have become mired in
code-related issues, and their role as community advocates — one of the
things that made NET so innovative in 1997 — has waned. CGR determined that
85 percent of each NET office’s workload is devoted to code-related activities.
The city modeled NET on a Miami
program, which also located inspectors, code enforcement officials, and police
officers in the same building. But Miami,
struggling with the same problems as Rochester,
re-centralized code enforcement officials and police officers in 2003. Columbus,
Ohio, and Baltimore,
Maryland, have done the same.
Whatever the city
decides, it is clear that change is already underway. Mayor Bob Duffy
relieved NET director Rodney Cox-Cooper of his duties and appointed Molly
Clifford, former head of the Monroe County Democratic Committee and his
campaign manager, in his place. Each office’s NET administrators are also
likely to see their jobs come under greater scrutiny in coming months.
In addition to suggesting possible major structural changes,
CGR recommended altering several specific actions. For $65,000, says the
report, the city could buy handheld computer tablets for inspectors. Despite
the initial cost, the move could actually save money. Currently, inspectors
write down all their observations on a sheet of paper and give it to a clerk
for filing. Technology would enable the city to remove or re-assign four
full-time clerks.
CGR also recommended extending NET’s
office hours into some evenings and weekends.
Despite the complaints, many NET critics say they want to
revitalize it, not abolish it. “I still believe that there are a lot of things
about NET that are good,” says Joan Roby-Davison. “The fact that they have been
unevenly administered is a problem.” But she adds: “I think that the NET office
or the NET administrative staff could return to what was originally envisioned
as a facilitator for neighborhood residents to navigate City Hall.”
And, she cautions, NET cannot eradicate all of Rochester’s
problems, or force city residents and business owners to abide by the law.
“Some aspects of NET reminds of dealing with my teenagers,” she says. “You can nag
them all you want, but you can’t make them clean their rooms. Just like with
NET, you can nag them all you want, but you can’t make them mow their grass.”
The options
In its report on Rochester’s Neighborhood Empowerment Teams program, the Center for Governmental Research says the city has four options for NET’s future, ranging from keeping the existing basic structure to dismantling NET as a separate entity. In all four, CGR recommends separating the duties of code inspection from those of code enforcement.
• Option 1: Retain the current NET structure, keeping code inspections and code enforcement duties in the NET offices but having them done by different personnel.
• Option 2: Take code functions out of NET and create a new, smaller NET. The six NET administrators would report to the mayor, as they do now. Code inspectors and code enforcement officers would return to City Hall, but the NET offices would keep their police officers and civilian staff. NET offices would function primarily as neighborhood advocacy centers, bringing NET closer to its original “mini City Hall” concept.
• Option 3: Create a smaller NET, as in Option 2, but move NET oversight out of the mayor’s office. Currently, the six NET administrators report to a NET director, who reports to the mayor. In this option, the NET director would report to the head of a city department, such as community development.
• Option 4: Dismantle NET as a separate entity and re-integrate all of its functions back into the community development, environmental services, and police departments.
The recommendations:
Although the CGR study does not recommend what form NET should take in the future, it does spell out some important specific, individual actions. Among them:
• Create a new mission statement that realistically outlines what NET can and cannot accomplish to help promote safe, clean, strong, viable, and attractive neighborhoods.
• Separate duties of code inspection and code enforcement, so that the same people aren’t doing both, and take those responsibilities out of NET.
• More aggressively analyze data about code violations, property-value changes, and changes in criminal activities to assess NET’s impact on city services.
• Assess whether enforcement policies are effective or counter-productive to the goals of NET.
• Consider extending civilian office hours to include some nights and weekends.
• Increase technological capabilities by spending $65,000 on handheld computers for inspectors.
• Create a standardized system for processing incoming service requests and tracking complaints.
• Provide conflict-resolution training for NET civilian personnel, to help them handle difficult situations better.
• Evaluate the controversial Certificate of Use program, which requires many small businesses to register with the city.
• Consider whether enforcement for some code violations should be directed at tenants rather than landlords.
• Study the impact of code enforcement on property values.
This article appears in Jan 11-17, 2006.
