WASHINGTON — Local governments offer lots of resources that some residents don’t realize are available.
That’s why the Fairfax County Department of Code Compliance held its first ever Neighborhood and Community Leaders Conference at Luther Jackson Middle School on Saturday.
The county reached out to neighborhood associations and community leaders to see what they were most interested in learning about from the county government.
“The leading thing people wanted to hear about was community association best practices,” Karen McClellan, Operations Manager at the Department of Code Compliance, said. “When you look at the target audience, it made a lot of sense.”
That featured a panel discussion on practices and strategies that support an effective association. Some areas looked at recruiting neighbors to take on a more active role in the community and utilizing county resources.
One of those resources is Code Compliance itself, which often handles compliance issues with residents inside these communities.
“We’ll go out and do an investigation and if it is a violation of the zoning ordinance, or a property maintenance violation, then we’ll take the necessary steps to bring that into compliance,” McClellan explained. “We have a lot of homeowners associations that try to deal with their neighbors first. A lot of times, we’re the last resort, which is good. That’s what we want to be.”
Code violations can range from not having the proper building permits, and having a poorly maintained property, to hoarding.
“We believe there’s somewhere around 3,500 hoarders, or people that hoard, in the county,” Rachael Perrott, Health Department Code Enforcement Strike Team supervisor, said. “It’s when the functionality of the house breaks down that we tend to want to get involved, or there is life safety issues like a blocked egress or an inability to quickly to get out in a fire.”
And many don’t know how to contact the county for help, which is why county officials organized the conference.
“We want to build trust and connectedness,” Code Enforcement Director Jeff Blackford said. “Even if someone doesn’t have a hoarding issue, now they have a county staff person that they have met and they might be comfortable with calling and say ‘Who do I talk to about trash collection?'”
A big resource many county residents overlook is the government’s website.
“Almost all of the county agencies now have online intake processes,” Blackford said. “Most people don’t know about those. Part of our mission here is to try to educate our residents about the tools that are available to them.”
One tool is the permitting process, which can be managed from start to finish online.
You can also check up on some regulations you weren’t too sure of, like if that house down the street is really allowed to have all of those cats. The answer, in case you were wondering, is “There are no limits on how many [cats] may be kept on a property.”
