Royston Looks Into Beefing Up Nuisance Ordinance

The City of Royston is looking a ways to beef up their code enforcement on dilapidated and abandoned buildings and other property eye sores.

At their City Council meeting Tuesday, Councilman Keith Turman said a better job needs to be done of cleaning up rundown and abandoned properties around town.

Turman said those kinds of properties are detractors from luring new businesses.

“Everyone wants new businesses to come our city, but it’s not attractive,” Turman asserted. “When potential new businesses come to our city they don’t just drive Highway 17 and 29, they drive through the whole city. They want to raise their families here and we’ve got stuff that we’re not doing anything about and it looks like we’re just inactive. Some of the problems that we have have just been there and have just festered.”

Turman pointed to some abandoned trailers at the City Cemetery that have been there for years and a pile of burned-out debris in his neighborhood where a house burned down last fall and the rubble has never been cleared away.

“If we want new businesses to come to our City and make an investment, we have to make an investment as well,” he concluded.

Royston Police Chief Donnie Boleman said the problem the town marshal is facing is coming up with the money to hire the crews to clean up nuisance properties when the owners will not or cannot pay for it.

Boleman said the City needs to set up a clean-up or abatement fund.

“We run into that situation all the time and I have discussed this with our city marshall,” Boleman said. “What we’ve talked about with these abatements is setting money aside that is not currently in the budget.”

Boleman suggested setting about $50,000 aside in the next fiscal budget to cover the cost of property abatements.

Mayor David Jordan meantime noted other areas of the town where buildings need to be torn down or repaired. Jordan said the City has received numerous complaints about eye-sore properties around College and Lee Sts.

“But we have done a lot of clean up over the past months,” Jordan said. “We are trying to get things cleaned up.”

City Manager Ed Andrews agreed with Chief Boleman that the problem is the cost to the City.

“It is a process, but we can get there,” Andrews said. “With the citations we have now on blighted areas, those blighted areas need to be addressed, but we need the horsepower behind it to adjudicate those areas and make them go away.”

City Attorney Andrea Grant told the council she had written an abatement ordinance for the City several years ago, but was not sure if it was ever instituted.

“Basically how it’s set out is after the city incurs its expenses in order to fix the blighted properties, then there’s a mechanism to make it a tax on the property that’s recorded in the deed records,” she explained. “Then there’s a process to foreclose or execute on that tax levy.”

Grant said the property could then be sold on the courthouse steps and the City could recoup their costs that way.

After more discussion, Mayor Jordan suggested Grant and Andrews work together to research the existing ordinance and come up with information for how the City should proceed.