Time for a trash confrontation

Lesa Best has done her best to get this city to use its power sanitize slumlords, their trashy tenants, and their crappy-looking, and often unhealthful properties. She has incessantly photographed and publicized this problem on the Internet and has presented her concerns to Newark City Council. She is an advocate of a cleaner, better Newark like none before her, that I know of.

Not just her interests are at stake, however. The community wants to have slumlords brought under control. Meanwhile, citizens are are paying city employees to do just that.

City employees, however, won’t do that. It’s not because the city doesn’t have the right ordinances in place, not because the city doesn’t have a good property maintenance code, not because the city doesn’t have administrators charged with enforcing these and other laws, not because the city doesn’t have a police department nor legal prosecutors, and not because it doesn’t have a mayor in charge of all this.

So why isn’t it working? Because the city has a mayor who has no grip, who has failed the city in his responsibility to enforce the city’s ordinances; who has not challenged slumlords with the enforcement tools he has. It’s that simple.

Not all of us who rent dwellings to tenants are slumlords. Some of us take care of our houses and our tenants. Some of us have as much pride in our rental properties’ appearance and safety and sanitation as we have for our own homes.

Lesa, after having embarrassed the city administration on its failure to confront slumlords hundreds of times in words and pictures, has convinced members of City Council’s Safety Committee that landlords and slumlords should be required to provide trash containers to tenants.

It will do no good and it will put an unnecessary and intrusive burden on landlords. If the mayor and his administration won’t enforce the Code and get their hands dirty handling slumlords, is the addition of this ill-conceived requirement is going to change that?

No, it won’t. What will change that is for the community to confront the mayor and his administrators and insist that the laws be enforced.

NEXT: NEWARK’S PROPERTY MAINTENANCE CODE AND WHY IT DOESN’T WORK