We were perplexed by that fancy Alliance Code Enforcement pickup driving around town last week, so we checked them out on Facebook and learned they’re a private company that specializes in code enforcement for municipalities and homeowner associations, and that they’d been hired by Mt. Gilead. But we had more questions, so we wrote them down and emailed them to Town Manager Matt Christian: “Why did the city hire Alliance and what do you hope they’ll accomplish? Isn’t code enforcement something that’s historically been done by someone on town staff? When were they hired? Will this move cost the town money? How do they decide which people in the community to target? Anything else you’d like to add?” Matt graciously provided the following answers:
The town began working with Alliance Code Enforcement on April 17, 2019. The goal is a simple one: clean up the town. To the best of my knowledge, Mount Gilead has never had a dedicated code enforcement officer. With a small staff and many competing priorities, code enforcement issues have often gone unaddressed over the years. In many places throughout town property owners have let their properties depreciate and degrade to the point where it negatively affects the image of our entire community. Not just the people living next door or down the street, but also our visitors and folks passing through. ACE is going to help us work through that backlog systematically, efficiently and fairly.
We are currently working on some of the most egregious violations. Primarily, these consist of vacant, overgrown and abandoned properties. We hope that progress on these cases helps build momentum for cleaning things up, and ACE will continue patrolling one day each week and following up on complaints. If you’re curious about the details of these cases, you can check out the code enforcement report in our May 7 meeting agenda materials. (Editor’s note: Scroll down to page 7 and you’ll see that ACE has opened 10 cases in town.)
Of course, this service is not free. ACE works in several other small communities and recently started working for the Piedmont Triad Regional Council to help their local government clients with code enforcement services. They charge an hourly rate of $40 to handle code enforcement cases from beginning to end. It’s important to note they have a focus on collaborating with property owners to achieve voluntary compliance. In 2017, ACE successfully coordinated demolition of 13 structures working with the town of Robbins without any cost to the town. I am hopeful that we will have similar successes. Considering the positive energy around cleaning up the historic downtown area, it only makes sense to help clean up our neighborhoods, too.