Should Neighbor Complaints to Code Enforcement officers be anonymous

#codeenforcement #housing #ordinance

New law passed in Florida requires you to submit your name and address on a code complaint.

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Thoughts:

1. I did get a letter from the county once. And I know one of my neighbors called. I just don’t know which one. It was a pretty silly violation anyway. My own reaction was that I just don’t trust my neighbors…if I knew who did it, I would likely not go out of my way to help them anymore.

2. Is a neighbor complaint always “frivolous”? Could action by the state decrease the chance for violence in the future?

3. How does adding your name to a complaint make it more legitimate?

4. “It’s going to interfere with the quiet enjoyment of neighborhoods”… because people will fear retaliation…but that assumes that the neighborhood was quiet and no complaint was filed in the first place, no?

5. Code officer discretion is an odd thing….so if you make a complaint and put your name to it, the officer can still decide not to investigate further? I can understand a bogus complaint, but it seems like if a citizen has a complaint and they’ve filed it in the appropriate manner, it should be investigated.

6. So, if something serious happens, now you would want to call the police and not code enforcement?

7. One county expects less complaints to equal more “proactive” enforcement because of the limited ability to file a complaint anonymously

8. inspection data shows that nearly half of the complaints his department received in a recent one-month period were from anonymous sources….which doesn’t tell us much because if no one asked a name, there would be an anonymous source regardless.

9. the majority of code investigations are proactive as opposed to complaint-driven so the law is “not really a change to what we’ve been doing.” She estimated that about 10% to 15% of investigations stem from a complaint.

In this case then, officers are currently not too busy handling anonymous complaints to be proactive?

10…apparently it is different in Miami “I would conservatively estimate, based on my experience in multiple jurisdictions, that approximately 80% of all code cases are complaint based, of which the majority were filed anonymously [to avoid retribution],” said Robert Santos-Alborná, Miami’s code compliance director.

So, this would be the opposite of the other community?

Sources: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article252958833.html

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