Fighting blight - protecting neighborhoods and taxpayers.

Over the years, I have worked hard, both on the City Council and in the state legislature, for anti-blight ordinances and laws to improve neighborhood quality of life.

For too long owners of slum housing and other irresponsible absentee property owners have brought down the quality of life in whole neighborhoods with their neglect and bad management.  This harms everyone.  It hurts people of meager means who live in slum housing.  It hurts the people whose neighborhood quality of life is torn down because they live near boarded-up buildings and slums.  And it means that taxpayers watch as their money ends up spent dealing with the problems caused so that out-of-town investor-owners can make money on the backs of New Britain residents.

That is why, when I was on the City Council, I re-wrote our city anti-blight ordinance to include strong quality of life standards that give the city sweeping ability to hold absentee property owners accountable.  Unfortunately, our city has not received the benefit of these strong anti-blight protections because these rules have not been fully enforced. As a result, slumlords and abandoned absentee-owner buildings continue to bring down the quality of life in neighborhoods, hurt the people who live in these buildings and cost homeowners more property taxes.

On top of this, I was recently surprised to learn that, there is actually a proposal in the City Council to remove the very neighborhood protections in the anti-blight ordinance that should be enforced.

I spoke up against this plan a City Council meeting.  Here is what I said (as reported in the the New Britain Herald):

"There are people in our neighborhoods who have shown me the blighted buildings in their neighborhoods that have been a problem for years, if not decades,” he said. “These are the types of things that inspired me to write our city’s anti-blight ordinance to make it stronger, so that we could actually go after the chronic blighted buildings in our city.”

O’Brien said he believed the changes would reverse what little has been done to enforce the current blight ordinance. If changed, the new ordinance would strip the ability of the city to deem a structure blighted, he said.

“Stripping out the most important fundamental neighborhood protections is a very bad idea,” O’Brien said. “If you pass the ordinance the way it is proposed tonight, it will help slumlords, it will help the owners of abandoned blighted properties and it will hurt neighborhoods.”

I would add that I said that I do think that there are a couple of good ideas in the proposed change.  One idea would allow the city to take advantage of state anti-blight laws allowing collection of anti-blight fines and fees through irresponsible property owners' tax bills and the other would activate the state Urban Homesteading law.  Adding these, rather than subtracting good things from the current anti-blight ordinance would be a good idea.

One of my priorities when I am Mayor will be to protect neighborhoods, tenants and taxpayers by strongly enforcing New Britain's anti-blight ordinance. Hopefully the City Council will see the wisdom of not weakening the anti-blight ordinance before then.