Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Public Input Meeting

From this notice at QCTimes.com:

City of Davenport staffers will host a meeting at 5:30 p.m. today at the Friendly House, 1221 Myrtle St., to solicit residents’ input on the upcoming switch of rental inspections and environmental enforcement to the Davenport Fire Department.

All the people you love to hate will be there, Malin, Clayton, Mike Loos... strangely enough even though none of them came up with this wacky plan, they get to take the heat for it.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dirty White Boy here ....

Before anyone starts mouthing off tonight about where Hamerlinck is, you should know that he will be teaching a class at Blackhawk. He wants to be there ... and you know it ... but the man has obligations to his students.

Should be an interesting meeting. Although stacked with the usual plants and "encouraged" city employees and speakers.

Anonymous said...

Indeed, dirty white boy.

The staff will try and cut the Davenport Action Initiative out of the loop. Their goal is to save all ten city employees.

They will make the arguement that there is now way to do anything other than raise fees on landlords. Every inspection will be done with three men and a truck, and so it will not be cost effective, etc. In reality, the NEO is not doing a good job now, and the firemen can only do better. Also, Bettendorf somehow manages to not use a truck every time.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Lubelle, pleeeasse!! Get off the Bettendorf thing, you keep bringing it up and you know that the inspections there are done in a totally different way.
I hope that what they are planning is to keep the NEO department. Lets all go tonight and see.

Anonymous said...

I am not Mr. Lubelle, and I don't even care about Bettendorf. I just know that Davenport is doing a lousy job. I sure hope they don't keep the same guys and keep getting the same lousy results.

Anonymous said...

I was at the meeting tonight. There were a lot of questions without answers. But there were a few good suggestions. Chief Freeze said he would send a truck to park near several rental inspection cars, and that would increase efficiency and allow the firemen to split up and use cars for their inspections (and still comply with the requirement of keeping the men near a truck). He also pointed out that the fire trucks get about 8 miles to a gallon, but that the crown Victorias that the current rental inspectors use don't do all that much better. Will using firemen save money overall? I think so, because they will be doing these inspections during times that they would otherwise not be too busy. Some landlords may suffer a bit because inspectors may have to leave in an emergency, but that is life in the City I guess. It should save the taxpayers close to a million, and I personally don't care too much if a landlord is inconvenienced every now and again.

Most interesting of all were some of the ideas from some of the people there. One of the ideas I liked was to raise fines on repeat offenders. I like that because it means that people who are either throwing garbage around or who are slumlords will have bigger consequences. That is one of the problems right now, because there are no real consequences for the bad guys. They keep getting chance after chance. Surprisingly, Lubell, the resident QCRPA hack, actually had an idea I liked. I guess after so many sleazy ideas he was finally due for a good one. The idea was to give garbage men digital cameras and have them photograph any really bad environmental situations and turn them over to the inspectors. That could go a long way without much additional cost. It might even improve things, since the garbage men are at the property every week.

All in all, it was kind of an interesting meeting. One thing was clear, staff does not have a well thought out plan right now, but maybe tonight's meeting may have helped. I got the idea that, for once, the staff was really listening.

Anonymous said...

Not one of those landlords pushing against the department actually lives in Davenport. They are slimy. The one suggested to license tenants instead of landlords - Well, not wonder - his is a slumlord.

The Davenport Action Initiative wasn't meant to handle a situation like this. That process is flawed if used in the manner the landlord group wants to take over, we shouldn't allow that to happen.

Anonymous said...

Ever notice that the landlords speaking out against the inspections live in Bettendorf and Walcott?

Anonymous said...

Oh my God, a landlord lives in Bettendorf? That is SOO far from Davenport, I don't know how they could possibly commute. I think they should be shot! Oh, no wait. I forgot. Many of the inspectors live out of town too. Lets shoot them while we are at it. It should be a crime to live outside of Davenport.

Anonymous said...

I think we should take a survey of solo landlords to see if they would actually themselves live in their own properties or even next door to them.

Anonymous said...

I think we should take a survey of the homes that the rental inspectors live in, and see how many of them could pass the list of 313 code violations that they selectively enforce.