Over the past six months the department has made a number of enhancements to increase its effectiveness. These include:
- Working with the City Council to adopt Chapter 28 of the City’s code. This chapter institutes a new broad set of housing standards and allows the Department to give meaningful penalties to violators, including daily fines of $100 to $500
- An increase in staffing and an increase in the number of hearings and inspections that happen every month
- A new inspection method based on ‘sweeps’. During a sweep an entire area of the city is inspected and all properties in violation are worked through the enforcement process. By inspecting entire areas instead of individual properties, the department hopes to stabilize the areas and make them catalysts for recovery in the surrounding neighborhoods
- Adopting government software called Accela, which digitizes the inspection and case building system and significantly increases productivity
- Working with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority to significantly increase the number of properties that are being expropriated each month
- Working with a non profit consulting firm who is helping the Department to research and adopt best practices of code enforcement departments in other cities.
- Teaming up with the New Orleans Police Department to create a criminal task force to reduce criminal activity in vacant properties and lots. This task force meets once a week and inspects properties that the NOPD has cited for criminal activity suspects of harboring criminal activity. Members of the Code Enforcement, Environmental Health and Safety and Permits departments site them for all violations.
The Department is eager to continue adopting new practices to improve its operations. Hurricane Katrina created a significant challenge for the Department. There are at least 40,000 blighted properties in the city and New Orleans has more vacant properties than any city in the country. However, the department is prosecuting more blighted properties than any city in America and has adopted changes that make it similar to the most effective Code Enforcement Departments in the nation. With consistent enforcement, the Department expects neighborhoods to come back stronger than they were before Katrina.