The city of Tulsa is spending approximately $1.2 million a year to clean up neglected properties but typically can only recoup about half that amount from the property owners, city councilors learned Wednesday.
The figures were discussed during a presentation to the City Council on the work Civic Innovation Fellowship has done to try to re-imagine how the city approaches property maintenance.
“The problem here — as many of you may know — is that enforcement of the property code violations is very costly and labor intensive,” said Travis Lowe, a Civic Innovation fellow.
Sixty property owners accounted for 10 percent of the nuisance code violation notices issued by the city of Tulsa over the past four years, according to a Civic Innovation study. Ten property owners, referred to as “frequent fliers,” accounted for 5 percent of all notices issued over that time.
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Dwain Midget, director of the city’s Working in Neighborhoods department, explained that the county often becomes the “involuntary owner” of property when the actual owner fails to pay the taxes on it.
The county each June holds a “tax sale” at which parcels whose taxes have not been paid for 3½ years are sold. If a minimum bid, as established by state law, is not received, the county becomes the involuntary owner of the property.
When the county is listed as the owner on a nuisance complaint, Midget said, the city does the remediation and Tulsa County pays for that work.
The county has been a good partner in trying to address the issue, Midget added, “but we will always have the county on the frequent flier list because they don’t control those properties.”
City Councilor Cass Fahler noted that a vast majority of the 60 property owners who accounted for 10 percent of nuisance violation notices in the past four years — excluding the Tulsa County properties — are non owner-occupied investment properties.
“I think there is the systematic problem that we have got to embrace,” Fahler said. “It is incumbent upon us, because who is having to bear this blight, or this unsightly property, is our neighbors, our residents.”
City Council Chairman Phil Lakin prefaced his remarks by saying he is “a big property-rights guy,” but went on to question whether there is a way to restrict frequent fliers and people like them from purchasing new properties.
“Is there any Oklahoma statute or federal statute or anything else that would allow us to prohibit people like some of these people on the frequent flier list from continuing to acquire properties if they have excessive numbers of liens, excessive numbers of penalties,” Lakin said.
Midget said he was unaware of any such law.
“What we want to do is see if there is any way that we can put some restrictions on irresponsible property owners, investors like that,” Midget said. “Right now, it doesn’t appear that we can do that.”
The Civic Innovation Fellowship was established by the Mayor’s Office in 2018 as a vehicle for Tulsans to help address vexing community problems. Six fellows worked for approximately six months on the property management problem with the goals of decreasing the number of code violations reported by 5 percent and of increasing by 5 percent the number of cases fixed by residents.
Proposed recommendations already in place — or nearing implementation — include texting a property owner or someone associated with the property when a tall grass complaint is received; attaching courtesy notices on doors reminding residents of the city’s regulations regarding tall grass and trash, junk and debris; and simplifying and clarifying nuisance notices.
The City Council is expected to take up the issue again soon. Wednesday’s meeting ended with Lakin saying he would like to know what best practices other cities are using to address the issue.
In other action: Councilors approved a resolution authorizing the city to pay a local social worker $175,000.
A Tulsa County jury in 2017 awarded Laura Lynn Fox a judgment $225,000 for her claims of malicious prosecution and negligence. However, the state’s Governmental Tort Claims Act, which the city argued shielded it from liability in the case, caps the amount of damages a plaintiff in such a case can receive at $175,000.
The lawsuit stemmed from Fox’s assertion that the Tulsa Police Department did not properly consider evidence before submitting a probable cause affidavit to prosecutors, who charged her in November 2013 with a misdemeanor count of failure to report child neglect. The case was dismissed about a month later after prosecutors received evidence from Fox’s criminal defense attorney, Adam Banner.
Fox claimed in her lawsuit that the charge damaged her reputation as a social worker.
