NOTE: This is report is in two parts, with the first having been posted Thursday. It explores in more detail the issues identified at the Arbors of Glasgow apartment complex; this one explores possible solutions.
By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
for Glasgow News 1
Amid an increase in violent crimes over the past two to three years that became particularly troublesome this spring plus an apparent lack of attention to maintenance, concerns have increased among some city leaders about the happenings at the Arbors of Glasgow apartment complex along Adams Place in Glasgow.
Working toward solutions
After attempts were made to no avail by Sheryl Peña, the city’s code enforcement officer, to get maintenance issues addressed without having to resort to issuing citations and fines, she eventually had to implement those additional measures.
In April, she issued the property – via J & S Property Management – nine citations with fines of $50 apiece for the types of problems she described. Half the fines have been paid, and she said she’s been assured the rest is coming. She said it was about to escalate to a second round of citations with a higher fine, but she held off once she started seeing improvements.
“Code enforcement is about getting compliance,” Peña said.
Arbors of Glasgow, owned by a company based in Cleveland, Ohio, is believed to be what is called a project-based Section 8 multifamily property, the owners or managers for which contract directly with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for a rental assistance program. At such properties, tenants apply directly there for rental assistance and, based on their gross income, pay a portion of the rent themselves, with the remainder paid by HUD.
City leaders’ concerns increased as maintenance and criminal activity did at the Arbors of Glasgow apartment complex in Glasgow. MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / for Glasgow News 1
A representative of the management company that oversees the complex did not return a call to Glasgow News 1 within 24 hours, after the news source was referred to her by the site manager.
Guy Howie, chief of the Glasgow Police Department, said that after hearing about some of the criminal activity there and seeing the condition of the buildings in the apartment complex shortly after starting in the position in April, he called the HUD office in May to try to expedite matters and was told later that HUD inspectors had since checked out the situation.
Since then, though, it seems additional inroads had been made with getting the place physically cleaned up, Howie and Peña each said separately. Peña has seen that some of the furniture and open storage gone and some of the siding and gutters fixed.
A maintenance person whom she’s met was sent in mid-June by the owner or the property management company to take care of some of those problems, she said, and around that time she had seen and reported a sewer issue there and they had called a plumbing company to take care of it right away.
Although the sign in the office window says the hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, it was Peña’s impression that no one was consistently there, that the presence was more part-time, and she said he had told the maintenance guy from Ohio she thought that could be part of the problem.
She had also suggested the possibility of offering community education-type classes that could instruct the residents how to remedy relatively simple problems for themselves before they become more significant, she said.
Peña said she felt optimistic that improvements would continue.
Over the past few weeks, the police department has established a substation just a block or so away from the apartment complex, in the Village Centre shopping center along Park Avenue. A ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house occurred there Thursday.
Although the substation won’t have someone there all the time, the goal is for it to be occupied frequently enough to allow community members the opportunity to stop by a more convenient location to report a crime, voice concerns, etc., with the added benefit of giving officers a more convenient location to write reports and such.
Glasgow Mayor Henry Royse, who voiced pride over the way the Father’s Day incident was handled, said he’s hopeful that having increased police visibility via a the new substation in the neighborhood will help curb some of the crime that’s been growing in the area for a while.
“We just need to go where the problem is, and this is great,” the mayor said.
Howie, who’s been a proponent of community-oriented policing, was asked whether anything additionally could be done to prevent future similar incidents as the one on Father’s Day and criminal activity in general.
He said the police can’t solve all of a neighborhood’s problems, and the chief said that while the department is the best tool in the city’s toolbox to help maintain a safe community, but making it a safe community is a combined effort and the responsibility of everyone, including and perhaps especially residents, who need to report suspicious activity and maintenance issues.
“I believe,” Howie said, “it’s incumbent upon the management of that apartment complex to enforce the lease agreements and to ensure that those residents and the apartments that they’re residing in are well-maintained and that they are providing them a quality-of-life living atmosphere. If they allow that to deteriorate, that allows a criminal element to come in, because they think, ‘This is where I can operate because they don’t care.’”
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