Fairfax County Supervisor Dana Kauffman is blasting county staff for “coddling” the owners of derelict properties and allowing neighborhoods in his district to decay.
Kauffman’s open campaign to combat blight in the Lee District represents a rare departure from the typical approach of Fairfax supervisors, who rarely make public serious battles with one another and county staff. At a board meeting this week, the supervisor attacked bureaucracy, inaction and an “oh-you-poor-dear approach” to violators that he says have allowed ramshackle buildings and front-lawn eyesores to proliferate.
He cited a shuttered Chi-Chi’s in Springfield as an example. The county’s housing department sent a letter to the owner of the deteriorating, graffiti-marked structure last year, indicating it didn’t meet the definition of blight and that “this office has no authority to ask you to fix anything with your property.”
“Somehow that fails the commonsense test,” Kauffman said in an interview with The Examiner on Wednesday. “If what you’re supposed to be doing is preserving neighborhoods, cleaning up commercial gateways, you don’t send a letter informing somebody what you can’t do. If the Police Department operated that way, they’d say ‘By the way, I’m a bad aim.’ ”
Kauffman’s office recently sent a newsletter on blight to residents in the district that he says elicited hundreds of calls for the county to look into various decaying properties. Many of the code violations, he said, come from older neighborhoods without homeowners’ associations to watch over them.
He said the county has adopted a policy of “voluntary compliance” and can take months to respond to complaints.
“My personal opinion is … write them up there and be done with it,” he said. “Give them 30 days and if it’s not done, drag them into court. I don’t need to make violators feel good.”
County spokeswoman Merni Fitzgerald issued a written response Wednesday afternoon by e-mail, writing that “staff is currently reviewing our efforts to improve both short and long term responses.”
“Our cross-organizational response must allow for a range of actions to address these challenges and sustain success,” she wrote.
