Last month, the city of Presque Isle — to much criticism — rolled out a draft ordinance seeking to create a registry and fine structure for vacant buildings within city limits.
The motivation, the city manager and city councilors said, is to identify properties that don’t currently violate building code, but their vacancy poses future risk for repeated break-ins and other situations that strain public safety resources.
“If we don’t even know what buildings in our community are empty, we can’t possibly foresee which ones in two or three years are going to be a problem,” Presque Isle City Manager Sonja Eyler said at a March 4 council meeting.
But landlords and developers in Aroostook County’s biggest city have strongly pushed back against the ordinance, calling it unnecessary taxation and insisting that it gives municipal officials too much power over private property.
Their backlash prompted the city to drastically redraft the local legislation to remove the registration requirement and hefty fees that accompanied it. But as the City Council prepares to vote on the ordinance this week, some say it still goes too far.
“I still think it represents a significant risk for abuse and government overreach,” Chris Carroll, president of the Presque Isle-based Carroll Management Group, said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News.
The original ordinance, presented in February, gave property owners 60 days to register a building as vacant after a sale or departure of a tenant.
The cost to register ranged from $200 to $500 for the first six months, depending on whether it was a residential or commercial property, and could increase up to five times those amounts if the property remained vacant for a year and a half.
It contained no exceptions for seasonal or temporary vacancies associated with property turnover and gave little leeway to developers with unrealized plans for buildings.
“The initial draft simply was poorly written. I’m surprised it even got that far,” Carroll said. “What it would have done is forced artificial turnover when there maybe shouldn’t have been.”
Carroll gave the example of a landlord keeping an apartment vacant to align with the schedule of a local college who would have been forced to pay the registration fee under the first proposed law.
“That goes against every sort of established foundational property right,” he said.
The updated ordinance eliminated the registration requirements and added caveats for seasonal and temporary vacancies.
“It seems to be more reasonable,” Adam Bindar, owner of Bindar Real Estate Investments, said of the changes. “That being said, I personally don’t like additional government regulations.”
Bindar’s company owns approximately 70 properties between Houlton and Caribou.
“I believe that all the City Council has very good intentions with what they’re trying to do,” he said. “They’re just trying to clean up the town and we really do need it. I just feel like it’s not quite the right way to go about it.”
Property owners would be levied fines by city’s code enforcement officer at 30 days after being issued a notice of violation if doors and windows were not weathertight and secure, structural elements are in disrepair or the property had “excessive vegetation, debris, rubbish, and vermin”
The fines range from $100 to $2,500 a day for every day the violation continues. The ordinance does not specify how that amount would be determined.
Other parts of the amended legislation also remain unclear, including how the city would work with developers who have non-immediate plans for a property that violates the ordinance.
“A lot of times the properties are acquired when they’re distressed because that’s when they can be acquired affordably,” Eric Cassidy, owner of Cassidy Property Management said to the council in a March 4 public hearing. “And so that timeline doesn’t necessarily match the developers timeline … [the developer] may be two or three years out in their plan.”
Presque Isle’s deputy council chair said the city would be flexible in those situations.
“I imagine that they would have a business plan that they would follow along with and as long as we understood what the intent was and what their duration was going to be, we could work with them to help them maintain it,” City Councilor Hank King said.
“That’s the perfect answer. I don’t see it in the document,” Cassidy replied.
The draft of the ordinance included in the packet for Wednesday’s City Council meeting contains minor text revisions from its previous iteration, but was not updated to address that concern.
The ordinance is a part of the Presque Isle’s larger growth plan, which is centered around encouraging infill and redevelopment in the densely populated areas of the city. But the ordinance as proposed is alienating the investors that are needed to make the plan work.
“The city says one thing that they want to work with the investors and want to be helpful, but the language and the ordinance says something completely different,” said a developer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution from local officials.
Carroll suggested that a disorderly property ordinance similar to what Orono instituted last year might be better in line with the council’s goals. Bindar said offering financial incentives to investors would be a better way of encouraging redevelopment.
“Presque Isle is the place I call home, and I’ll defend it until my face is blue, but we need to be careful that we don’t disenfranchise our taxpayers,” Carroll said.