Inquirer: Progress, but not a lot, in City Village

We’re back in City Village, that stretch between TSYS and Bibb City, where some progress has been made, and some has not.

We’re also here today to talk about city ordinances and the people who enforce them.

Lisa, the City Village pioneer we wrote about last week, continues to try to get the city to take better care of its considerable property holdings along her street.

As you’ll recall, she had been in contact with the city over several issues, which led them to send a compliance officer out to investigate. As a result, she was rewarded with a citation for having a pile of concrete chunks on her property she was instructed to remove.

But she pointed out, correctly, that the concrete was on city property, and so the city hauled it off. But not before telling her that another large concrete chunk, with a piece of reinforcing steel protruding, had to be removed.

“So I guess I'm borrowing a sledge hammer today,” Lisa said.

The other upshot was that, while they were in the neighborhood, the inspectors discovered a burned down house down the street and notified the owner, an elderly man, according to Lisa, that it needed to be demolished and hauled away.

Lisa told the officer that she didn’t want to be the reason the old guy got cited, but the officer said he can’t just ignore the illegal situation.

Lisa understands that, but I’m not sure everyone else does.

I hear with alarming regularity from readers who wish code inspectors and police officers should have better things to do than harass private citizens.

It might be unfortunate that, while investigating the city’s shortcomings on keeping up its own property, inspectors discovered violations by private property owners that need to be addressed.

But don’t blame the code enforcement people for doing their jobs. They aren’t paid (and they sure aren’t paid enough) to decide which ordinances they should and should not enforce.

This reminds me of a story we ran recently about police arresting a stripper for stripping off a little too much. The cops were making their regular spot check to see if bar workers had valid ABC cards, which is one of the laws they swore an oath to enforce.

While they were in the strip joint checking the ABC cards, they noticed a stripper going beyond the permissible level of nudity. That is, she either wore no g-string or no pasties, or maybe neither.

On social media and on our website’s comment section following the story, people lambasted the police, pointing out that there were much more serious offenses taking place, and the cops should be looking for those miscreants instead of picking on a stripper for stripping.

Those might be legitimate complaints, but don’t complain to the cops. They don’t make the laws, and they don’t get to pick and choose which ones they enforce. The same goes for the special enforcement folks. They don’t have the authority to “look the other way.”

Before you start bleeding out of your eyes and baying at the moon, I will grant that there have no doubt been instances that the authorities have done just that — looked the other way to allow someone to get away with something.

Welcome to the real world.

But that doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t make it the norm, thank goodness.

If you want to complain to someone about police officers being on pastie patrol or code enforcement officers enforcing code, complain to the folks who make the laws, not the man and women they hire to enforce them.

This story was originally published April 10, 2016 at 9:35 PM with the headline "Inquirer: Progress, but not a lot, in City Village."