02-25-2004 Council Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

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515 Little Canada Road, Little Canada. MN 55117 -1600 (651) 766 -4029 / FAX: (651) 766-4048 www.ci.little- canada.mn.us MEMORANDUM TO: Mayor Fahey & Members of the City Council FROM: Joel Hanson, City Administrator DATE: February 20, 2004 RE: Junk Car Sweep MAYOR Michael I. Fahey COUNCIL Jim LaValle Malt Anderson Rick Montour 6111 Blesener ADMINISTRATOR Joel R. Hanson At our Council Workshop held on January 14`x', we talked about code enforcement issues. One of the topics was assigning a priority to junk cars. Staff has suggested the possibility of a proactive inspection of' the entire city to identify the existence of junk cars (unlicensed or inoperable vehicles) given this is one of our most active complaint areas. This type of operation is best conducted during winter months when vegetation is at a minimum and vehicles that have been parked a long time without moving are identified by the presence of snow. Staff believes there are many of these vehicles present throughout the City. This was verified when our code enforcement officer drove through a portion of the City (less than 20 %) and identified about 40 properties that appeared to have junk cars present. (The letter we proposed to send to those property owners is attached for your review.) Given the fact this topic did not receive a lot of discussion at our earlier workshop, staff felt we should bring this item back for your comments before embarking on this course of action. This program will likely result in a number of notices going out and some potential fallout in terms of citizen satisfaction with our efforts. We want to ensure you are comfortable with this approach before we get too deep into Should you want to follow a proactive approach, staff will continue with our plan, subject to any modifications you suggest. The alternative would be to continue with a complaint based program and only deal with problems that are brought to our attention.