A strike team of Fairfax County agencies formed to crack down on overcrowding, blight and other community nuisances has issued 74 warnings since its launch at the beginning of June, according to an official with the team.
Of those, 32 are zoning violations and 42 have to do with building or property maintenance, said David McKernan, a deputy chief with the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department. Overcrowding, he said, is the largest single violation.
The warnings, or “notices of violation,” do not themselves carry a penalty, and they give the owner a few days to fix the problem.
Failure to do so, however, will result in action from the county, McKernan said. The strike team is investigating or pursuing prosecutions in 47 cases, according to the county’s Office of Public Affairs.
The county has successfully gotten one misdemeanor conviction, against Raimundo Guevara, co-owner of a Springfield home on Dana Avenue, for violating fire code. Officials are also pursuing a civil case against Guevara for exceeding the county’s maximum-occupancy laws.
Guevara could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
The strike team emerged from a push by Lee District Supervisor Dana Kauffman, who blasted county staff earlier this year for failing to enforce local ordinances and allowing neighborhoods to decay. It is made up of zoning, public works, fire, health and law enforcement personnel.
No single part of the county is being targeted, according to McKernan.
“At this moment, we’re complaint driven, so it’s depending on where we’re getting the complaint from,” he said.
Typically, those complaints are coming from the county’s older neighborhoods closer to the Beltway, where homes were built in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
