West Valley cleanup effort showing signs of progress, officials say

WEST VALLEY CITY — In some neighborhoods, cars are still parked on lawns next to sofas that never made it past the front door. But less than a year after launching a renewed cleanup effort, city officials say they are seeing signs of progress.

Around the city, 43 percent of homes had at least one code violation, according to a survey conducted last summer. With nearly twice as many code enforcement officers now working to purge those problems from within the city, that number dropped to 27 percent, a new survey released last month showed.

"I drive around the neighborhoods and they're clearly better," West Valley City Manager Wayne Pyle said. "They're better than they were six months ago."

Cleaning up the city's neighborhoods has long been a priority for residents, said community preservation director Layne Morris. And last year, the city nearly doubled the number of its code enforcement officers, from seven to 13.

"We're tired of having so many houses in our neighborhoods where there's no pride of ownership," Morris said. "We've got engine blocks on the lawn. People are conducting automotive shops in their driveways at all hours. And they have stuff scattered all over the place."

That "pride of ownership" is lacking, in part, because of the number of rental properties within the city, Pyle said. About 20 percent of the city's roughly 25,000 single-family homes are rented.

To counter that, the city has implemented a good landlord program, which gives owners a financial incentive to maintain their rental properties.

In terms of code violations, outside storage has been the biggest concern for enforcement officers, who find couches, tables and sacks of old clothes strewn about yards, Morris said. The city is also cracking down on inoperable vehicles, litter, graffiti and landscaping violations.

"This is a huge effort," Pyle said. "This is not just about picking up litter or painting over graffiti. This is a city wide effort to preserve our neighborhoods."

In some cases, it's about restoring neighborhoods that have suffered from decades of neglect. Many of those neighborhoods are on the city's east side, where surveys showed code violations were the highest.

Even before they doubled up, enforcement officers were handing out about 3,200 "courtesy notices" each year, officials said. The process, however, is meant to be more informative than punitive. Only about 20 percent of those courtesy notices turned into violation notices, which give renters and homeowners 10 days to fix the problem or face a fine, Morris said.

The city plans to conduct another survey next summer to see if the improvements are lasting.

E-mail: afalk@desnews.com