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Group calls for upgrade of property database in Trumbull
By Ed Runyan
WARREn
If Nate Brown, a Trumbull County representative for the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, was trying to provoke Warren officials when he presented the organization’s vacant- property survey this week, he accomplished his goal.
In pointing out the city didn’t make rental-property data readily available to the public, he showed reporters Thursday a printout the city had given him when he asked for a list of rental properties.
Brown and a colleague unfolded the inch-thick, accordion-style printout with holes on the sides, and Brown made a crack about how he hadn’t seen that type of “dot-matrix” printout since he was 5 years old — roughly 20 years ago.
It was the way Brown decided to dramatize the point the city should update its rental registration program — one of the recommendations contained in the survey.
What Brown wanted was a way to access the information the city has on its roughly 9,000 rental houses and apartments. Giving the public that information would enable the MVOC and city residents to hold landlords and city officials more accountable, said Phil Kidd, another MVOC official.
There are places where MVOC and the public can get that type of information, Kidd said, such as a Youngstown State University website that tracks Youngstown’s rental property, demolition activity and police activity.
Youngstown also is preparing a database of this type, Kidd said, and MVOC is urging the city to make that information available to the public, hopefully on the Internet, Kidd said.
The MVOC is a community organizing agency with the primary goal of bringing groups throughout the community together to increase the quality of life in the Mahoning Valley’s urban neighborhoods.
Bob Pinti, deputy health commissioner, said Brown can criticize the printout provided by the Warren Data Processing Department as being antiquated, but that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the computer system being used.
Any city resident who contacts the health department can find out information about rental properties, including the name of the landlord and whether the structure has been cited for housing violations, Pinti said.
“We ask humbly that the city modernize its rental registration data management so that the data is readily available, preferably online, to those who seek it,” the MVOC’s written report said.
During his presentation on the front steps of the Trumbull County Administration Building, Brown also urged the city to develop a targeted demolition program based, in part, on the rating system outlined in the MVOC survey, which rated each vacant structure from A to F depending on its quality.
Brown said a targeted demolition program would devote scarce demolition funds to areas of the city that could be most dramatically improved.
He said the city’s current method of demolishing all of the worst houses in the city is “scattershot” and “irresponsible.” Instead, the city should focus on areas of the city that are “in transition.”
The part of the city in the worst shape with regard to vacant properties — the Southwest — should be “written off,” he said.
The MVOC report and the city’s 2009 Poggemeyer strategic plan both mention the wisdom of using a “targeted demolition program.”
Charlene Kerr, one of the principal authors of the Poggemeyer plan, told members of the Strategic Planning Committee of city council two years ago that she understood that Warren residents did not want large tracts of Southwest Warren demolished and was not going to recommend such a strategy.