The Soldotna City Council passed a resolution Wednesday allowing the city’s lawyer to draft litigation against a property owner whose partially burned home on Riverview Drive is considered dangerous.
Stephanie Queen, Soldotna’s Director of Economic Development & Planning, says informal conversations with the home owner began in 2014, asking them to secure the burned and open end of the home so people could not get in and get hurt.
Queen: “We issue notices of violation, we typically don’t do that unless we’ve had quite a bit of back and forth conversations with the person and in this case we had. It was in October that our building official actually issued the formal notice of violation to the property owner and that has not been complied with.”
Queen says the property owner has worked with the city a couple of times prior to October to clean-up the property, even once allowing city crews to take two dump trucks full of garbage to the dump.
Council members asked if the city could be held liable if a member of the public entered the dangerous structure and was injured. Soldotna Building Inspector Ralph Linn told them that as far as he knows, the city could not be held liable because they do not have ownership in the home.
Queen: “We have codes about public nuisance and they’re put in place because public nuisances can have a detrimental effect on the community at large. They can bring down property values, they can bring about illicit behavior, they can be an eyesore, or they can in some cases be an actual danger to physical health to the community. So in general, those are the laws that the dangerous building code and public nuisance code are trying to uphold. So that would be the reason why the city council wants us to move forward.”
Queen says she hopes that by the city moving forward with drafting the litigation the property owner will take action to remedy the dangerous home that is considered a public nuisance.
Contact with the property owner has been unsuccessful.
