On March 25, the Cambridge City Council unanimously approved Ordinance No. 1234, which established a Land Bank Authority to “acquire, manage, maintain, and repurpose blighted, abandoned, and distressed properties,” as well as sell vacant land to stabilize neighborhoods and encourage redevelopment. City Attorney Patrick Thomas said that Cambridge would be the first Maryland municipality to create a land bank.
It’s a project that has been several years in the making. The Land Bank Authority of Cambridge, Inc., begins with $1 million of funding to start offering desperately needed affordable housing units.
“We conceptually understood the council wanted the land bank, but there was some delay about just making sure we had the staff resources to support it and really push it through,” Assistant City Manager Brandon Hesson told the Spy. “But, yeah, it did wind up taking probably way too long because you had to—all the I’s and T’s still had to be taken care of.”
The C.E.D.
However, for land banking to work in the city, the Code Enforcement Division must be operating at its best. This is something Hesson knows very well. But what is this division all about?
“So, code enforcement is property maintenance code,” he explained. “Code enforcement generally is outside property, conditions of a property. That’s the regular patrolling code enforcement that everybody thinks of.”
This division is also involved in condemning houses. Additionally, when there is a fire in town, Code Enforcement documents the damage for the homeowner. While they are technically citing the owners, they are also discussing repairs. Additionally, they are the mechanism for applying pressure to building owners who need to do such maintenance as elevator repair, so people with mobility issues can get from one floor to another. When they see unsafe conditions, Code Enforcement can get a health department or fire marshal involved.
“It needs to be stern and it needs to be strict and have guidelines, but it can also work with property owners to make progress,” said Hesson. “It takes a while. By the time something gets to court, you’ve cited that thing months ago, and then oftentimes, the court, for good reasons, will grant even more extensions. So, you’re looking at a thing that should be easily fixable in a couple of weeks, but you’re three months into this violation.”
Walking the Beat
November 2023 brought an announcement that code enforcement officers would be putting their feet to the pavement three days a week. The goal was for the three officers to enhance community standards by getting out of their cars to examine buildings in the five wards of Cambridge more closely and thoroughly.
“We’ve had a few hiccups,” Hesson admitted. “Just like any new program, you run into some hurdles. And so, of course, you figure three days a week, and then you hit the winter, and the conditions maybe aren’t really responsive for people to walk around for three days.”
The team has managed some kind of presence every week, and they’ve remained on schedule. The foot patrols have, so far, produced inconclusive results, but Hesson said the point of the initiative was to make sure the CED was in every neighborhood equally.
“It’s a way of guaranteeing that we see that we are on every single street,” he elaborated. “We focused too much on certain neighborhoods. Certain parts of this town get entirely too much scrutiny from code enforcement.”
Hesson went on to explain that what a code enforcement officer sees from the vehicle is different from what they see walking around. For example, when he himself drives along a particular route, he ends up always going in the same direction and only seeing one side of a house. On foot, he’s forced to see much more. Plus, getting out of their cars makes the officers visible to the community.
Hopes for the Future
Hesson envisions an expansion of the CED’s goals and responsibilities. “Where we hope it goes is interior inspections of rental properties on a rolling scale. So, if you own a rental home, the goal here eventually is going to be to inspect the inside of that property once every three years. Most people are going to comply easily, but a lot of this is to make sure that we’re upholding livability status standards on the inside, not just the outside.”
There is also a plan to improve the efficiency of the CED, which is why, on December 11, the Cambridge City Council voted to enter into an agreement with government software company OpenGov. It would replace the present system, which comes from Comcast.
“It’s not terrible,” said Hesson. “It’s a place to hold pictures. When I send a letter, that letter gets stored in the system. That system is old, not the best, although it does the job. And there’s no technology, like, in a vehicle.”
As an example, Hesson might drive around a neighborhood and see a couch sitting in a side yard. He would take photos and write up the infraction, and probably conduct a full property inspection while there. This would take 15 minutes. Returning to the office, he would discover that another code enforcement officer had written up the same property. If that kind of thing happened four times a day, five days a week, the time wasted would be alarming.
“The other side of this,” said Hesson, “is that everything has to be done by paper for legal reasons. We want to mail letters because we know that they go out and they have to go to the homeowner, all that other stuff. But imagine if you got a code enforcement violation and you have the ability to then reply, to tell us what you did to correct the situation. Maybe pay your fine online, things like that. There’s no way in heck that can happen with our current old system.”
According to a December 7 memo from Hesson to the mayor and city commissioners, OpenGov’s asset management and permitting and licensing modules would allow Cambridge to streamline and implement many resources, including code enforcement in the field. Now that its implementation has been approved, use of it by the city should begin in a few months.
Land Banking
“Now what we have to do is stand up a board,” said Hesson. “We’ve got to reach out to folks and get interest to see who might be interested to sit on the Land Bank Authority of Cambridge. That first board would be, as is often the case with these things, it has to do a lot of heavy lifting. This is a group that’s going to have to get bylaws going. They’re going to have to really kind of chart a course.”
This is where it gets complicated. The city will help stand up the authority, but ultimately they want it to be self-sustaining.
“We’ve got a little ways to go,” Hesson explained. “Land bank is a big monster. It’s a big house to build. And it’s kind of cool because we’ve broken ground, and the rest of it will start to happen. But you still have to make sure you’re doing it properly.”
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