Extra inspector to focus on quality of life issues Freehold hopes to balance rights of residents with compassion By Clare Marie celano Staff Writer JERRY WOLKOWITZ Freehold Borough Police Department Special Officer Justin Giove (l) and code enforcement officer Hank Stryker will form the town's Quality of Life Enforcement Team that will seek out violations of municipal codes and issue summonses for those violations. FREEHOLD â014 Steps are being taken to address the problem of overcrowding in some borough housing. The formation of a Quality of Life Enforcement Team, an approach that will attempt to balance the rights of long-term residents of the town with compassion for the borough's newest residents â014 largely Hispanic immigrants â014 was announced at a recent council meeting. Councilman Kevin Coyne said the team was formed in response to an increase in complaints and an increase in the crowded living conditions in town. He said the proposal grew out of discussions held by members of a new subcommittee that is trying to develop solutions to the issue of overcrowding in residential units. Coyne is a member of the Borough Council, the borough's Human Relations Committee and the subcommittee on overcrowding. Coyne said the council patterned Freehold's new Quality of Life Enforcement Team on the Livability Court, a special division of the Charleston, S.C., municipal court that deals with small infractions, thereby segregating these from more serious offenses. The councilman said several municipal officials read an article in The New York Times that explained how Charleston officials developed a way to deal with infractions such as animal control cases, code violations, broken windows, sanitation issues and tourism cases. The Livability Court deals only with these violations, giving them the weight and the focus they deserve. According to Coyne, the plan is in place for the borough's Quality of Life Enforcement Team to be in effect, hopefully this summer. Municipal officials have made the following decisions to deal with these issues: â022 The borough will hire one additional code enforcement officer to handle all types of quality of life complaints and violations. This position will be assigned to an evening shift. The special purpose of this position will be to address all types of quality of life issues, i.e., overcrowding complaints, littering, housing violations, abandoned vehicles, etc. â022 The police chief will assign the special officer (II) to the code enforcement function to address the quality of life issues. This assignment will not be a replacement for quality of life infractions witnessed by patrol officers in the normal course of their duties. Essentially, this position along with the new code enforcement officer will serve as the borough's Quality of Life Enforcement Team. In addition, the borough will explore methods to hire an additional special officer (I) to patrol the downtown area. â022 A special court session will be established to handle all summonses issued by the Quality of Life Enforcement Team and all violations affecting the quality of life in general throughout the borough. â022 The borough is in the process of revising the Landlord Registration Ordinance to track absentee landlords within the borough and also provide a funding source to cover the costs of the Quality of Life Enforcement Team. â022 The borough and Conrail are discussing ways in which the railroad tracks can be cleaned. A major cleanup effort will take place in the near future. The borough will install a fence along the railroad tracks in the area where illegal dumping is occurring. â022 The borough will be hiring a police officer who is bilingual in English and Spanish. Coyne said the enforcement code will be reasonable. The borough will not be enforcing any new ordinances. Instead, the Quality of Life Court will allow officials to focus more attention on the issues that sometimes get lost in the shuffle of more serious offenses. The court will allow officials to concentrate on the details of cases like littering, code violations, residential overcrowding, public drinking and other sani-tation issues. Coyne said police officers will be encouraged to write summonses for these violations; something they may have been reluctant to do before because they understood the difficulty involved in attempting to enforce these types of ordinances. The new special officer assigned to the quality of life team will be working an evening shift and conduct inspections and respond to complaints at the times when these violations commonly occur. In focusing on the issue of residential overcrowding, Coyne mentioned that he had taken his 2-year-old son for a walk one evening a few nights earlier. On their walk, he said, he noticed a young Hispanic man looking at his son and the expression on the young man's face both touched and saddened Coyne. "The way he looked at my son," Coyne revealed quietly, "I knew he had a little one as well. He clearly had left a family behind. It broke my heart. We've tried to balance respect with compassion. We don't want our newest residents exploited, and we simply cannot have the overcrowding any longer. It is unsafe." Coyne said officials are working to address the situation and prevent what he said is his worst fear â014 that one day he will see a firefighter carrying out a dead child from a home which had too many people living in it. "We don't have enough people to handle the overcrowding," he said. "We only have two code enforcement officials." Referring to the two officers, Hank Stryker and Jean Kaufmann, Coyne said they conduct annual inspections at the town's apartment complexes. Now, however, the problems have grown to include single-family dwellings with absentee landlords. This, he said, is causing major difficulties. "Absentee landlords buy homes in the borough cheaply and then rent them out," Coyne said. "There are numerous single-family dwellings that are rentals now. It's a new phenomenon. Because the homes are not owner-occupied rentals, the landlords of these units are very difficult to locate to enforce our codes." Coyne said inspections on the apartment complexes in town are a one-step inspection process because the inspectors deal with one owner who is responsible for the building. He noted that units at complexes such as the Parker House condominiums on Broad Street are individually owned and non-owner occupied, meaning that the code enforcer must deal with 78 owners of 78 individual units. "This made it extremely difficult to enforce our code enforcement issues in the past," he said. Coyne said the new Quality of Life Enforcement Team will make enforcement of existing laws easier. He said the team will help borough officials get a better idea of the number of non-owner occupied units in town, especially the single-family dwellings. One topic to be addressed is landlord registration fees. Council members are still working on this issue and the figures are yet to be determined, he said. "We cannot ask our taxpayers to pay the bill for this," Coyne said. "The fee must be imposed on the landlords of all non-owner occupied dwellings. I know that good, honest landlords are going to have a problem dealing with this increase, but we cannot differentiate," Coyne explained. "It's a self-policing mechanism for us." He said conditions in the borough as they relate to immigrants in need of housing are part of larger issues such as federal immigration policies and international economics. Federal immigration officials informed borough officials more than a decade ago that municipal representatives have no jurisdiction when it comes to removing illegal immigrants from the community. "It's economics that make it profitable for immigrants to be here. Everyone in Marlboro hires a lawn service. This is putting a burden on the town of Freehold Borough," Coyne said. "Out town is, in essence, subsidizing a cheap labor force for all of western Monmouth County. Someone has to pay the freight. We are educating the children of the labor force. We have a moral obligation to do this, and we do it willingly, but we need some help from the state and the federal governments. The borough is not benefiting from the majority of this labor force. We are a small town of 11,000 people, and we are not equipped to handle this situation alone. This is well beyond our scope." Coyne said the council has written to state and federal officials to ask for funding to support the hiring of an additional code enforcement officer and a bilingual police officer. With no response forthcoming, borough officials have decided to go it alone and ask questions later. He said the Quality of Life Enforcement Team will be subsidized by the money generated from the court cases resulting from those issues and from the landlord registration fees. "We're a small town of limited means," Coyne said, "and we're doing the best job we can. We are trying to do things that will show compassion to our new residents and respect the rights of all our long-term residents as well." The councilman said officials acknowledge the difficulties immigrants have living in a new environment and said all of the council members have "nothing but compassion" for all the new residents of the borough. "We appreciate their epic stories. They have suffered mightily to get here," he said. "No one with a heart has anything but compassion for their plight, but we must also continue to respect the rights of longtime residents of the town as well."