By Dwight Dana
Morning News reporter
Published: June 4, 2009

FLORENCE — A special Florence City Council meeting to discuss the 2009-2010 budget was derailed Thursday afternoon when talk of cutting out-of-state travel expenses erupted.

Councilman Bill Bradham said the current policy needs revising with new members on council. He said he was going to suggest that council eliminate all out-of-state travel, effective July 1.

Bradham said an exception could be made if a member can justify a trip to Washington, D.C., but that member would have to bring the matter before the whole council for approval.

“Last year our travel expenses were way up there,” Bradham said. “I’m not going to bring up individual expenses, but they are available for anybody who wants to request them through the Freedom of Information Act. This year’s budget has $30,000 for travel and I think we can cut that.”

“I’m going to say what I’ve got to say,” Councilman Ed Robinson said. “I think that the comments that were made just a few minutes ago were racist. You are trying to preserve what you think is good.

“If you want to stop the years that we’ve worked with the national legislature to build up the relationships that we’ve built up to get where we are now — and all of a sudden we don’t need to do that anymore. We don’t — a certain group don’t go to Washington — so nobody else needs to go?”

Robinson said a group that goes to South Carolina doesn’t bring any money to Florence.

“That group that goes to Washington does,” he said. “We’re getting ready to try to build a city and you can’t build a city if you don’t spend some money. And the money that we — Councilman (Billy D.) Williams and I — I mostly for the areas that need the money. We built up a relationship to bring money into Florence and that’s what we’ve done.

“You look at this (travel) as pleasure, but it’s work for us. We go up there (Washington) to work. I’m chairman of the Municipal Black Caucus. Those kinds of things I worked hard to get. The money that we bring in is millions more that what we spend.”

Williams took particular umbrage with the thought of having to ask council for permission to travel to Washington. He alluded to all the money he’s brought into Florence for such projects as the old BellSouth garage and for removal of the old Bush Recycle site.

“I been trying to get that junk yard moved for 18 years, 18 long years,” he said pounding on the table for emphasis. “And it’s gone. That money didn’t walk in here by itself.

“Every time I step foot out of this town I lose personal money, but I think it’s more important to represent the people. When you got to Columbia the only thing you get is the chance to come back home. When we go to Washington, we come back with something.”

Discussion about the need for additional police also met with dissension between Robinson and Mayor Stephen J. Wukela.

“When you look at Florence being 48 percent black and you’ve got all these black folk in jail, I say there’s a problem,” Robinson said. “I think a study needs to be done.”

“When I visited that lady on Sumter Street and she said she couldn’t sit on her front porch because people are dealing drugs, I think something needs to be done,” Wukela said. “I don’t think you can go to her and say we’re going to get some programs that will encourage people not to do this. There isn’t any substitute for the presence of police.”

FLORENCE – Florence’s problems with abandoned and derelict homes, and the city’s plans to deal with them, are nothing new.

Its likely blighted neighborhoods have existed almost as long as cities have existed.

What is new, though, is the will and determination city officials have expressed at dealing with the situation.

And it’s a solution that may prove to be as much a journey as it is a destination, Florence Mayor Stephen Wukela said.

“It’s a complicated issue and it’s going to take some time,” the freshman mayor said after a press conference at the end of 2008 at which he kicked off action against eight – out of several hundred – homes.

The initial action relied on existing city ordinances, but that won’t be for long.

Wukela said he also initiated moves to clean up the city’s myriad of ordinances that address the situation.

Some of those changes, the mayor said, involve defining “owner” for the city’s purposes and could include taking a portion of homeowner’s insurance settlements to pay for cleanup following house fires – in the event the home owner doesn’t handle cleanup or restoration, he said.

That, though, would be a solution for the future and not resolve the charred remains that now dot city neighborhoods.

“These properties we’re dealing with have been burned down for many years,” Wukela said. Insurance proceeds, if there were any, are likely long gone.

And to call the city’s abandoned housing issue complicated may be an understatement.

There are all sorts of property owners who may, or may not, have resources.

“We have properties owned by large corporations and people in town who have the financial wherewithal to repair those properties,” Scotty Davis, Florence Community Development director, said.

Those owners may soon find themselves encouraged by the city to do just that.

There are also owners who don’t have the resources to clean up their property.

There are abandoned houses in Florence where trees grow in the middle of the dwelling, or the roof has fallen in and those present a safety issue, Davis said.

“We have no other choice but to remove those units,” he said.

And that removal comes out of the city’s budget – taxpayer dollars.

To protect the taxpayers, the city can take action – place a lien on the property—to make sure the money spent to cleanup property is eventually paid back.

One type of lien would be much like a mortgage where the city would have clear title to the property when all was said and done

In the second type of lien, a tax lien, the city would have to bring a separate action to gain clear title to the land.

Tax liens, Wukela said, are simpler and less expensive for the city.

Without clear title, though, the city would still have the ability, once it moved on a property, to maintain it as a city park or green space, he said.

In either instance, the city could put itself in line to get reimbursed if the property is redeveloped or sold.

AGING RESIDENTS & POPULATION SHIFTS

While a look at Davis’ list of abandoned homes in Florence shows no neighborhood is immune, it also shows several areas have more abandoned homes than others.

Situations like that don’t happen overnight but are the result of a decline over years.

“We find when people transition into Florence they don’t locate into the neighborhoods of north and east Florence,” Davis said.

Both areas contain many of the homes on Davis’ list.

“The children who grew up there are leaving those neighborhoods and going to different neighborhoods or cities,” Davis said.

Residents left in those neighborhoods are frequently unable to keep up with maintenance on their homes.

“Most of the people in those neighborhoods are our elderly and our seniors. They don’t have the income to make repairs and such. The dollars just aren’t there to keep the houses maintained,” Davis said.

In situations like that, Davis said the city doesn’t really have a lot of options.

“There’s a fine line between using public funds for private enterprise,” Davis said..

Davis said, though, he frequently works through community organizations to help.

“As the government, we certainly don’t have all the answers,” Davis said.

HEIR PROPERTY

One challenge the city frequently faces is finding the owner of the property.

While the city has names on the tax rolls, sometimes with abandoned property that person is dead, and the heirs of that person may be dead as well.

“An owner, two or three generations back, lived in the property, died and the heirs to the property, who may be scattered all over, have no interest in the property anymore,” Wukela said.

“It presents the biggest problem when you’re serving the owner” with notice of the city’s action, the mayor said.

“It may be the most efficient way to deal with those problem sis to define the owner of the property for our purposes as the person who is on the tax roll,” Wukela said.

GROUND ZERO

Two groups in the city are the most exposed to the abandoned houses – neighbors and police.

“It’s sort of a nice neighborhood, everybody stays to themselves,” Tara Smith said of her East Pine Street neighborhood.

Smith’s home sits among three abandoned houses.

“The city’s trying to do their part, I’ll give them credit,” Smith said.

And city officials have worked with residents on the abandoned houses issue, she said.

Her neighborhood needs a lot of work done to it, Smith said.

And just because houses are abandoned doesn’t mean they’re vacant.

Smith said she sits on her porch and watches people come and go from the houses.

Abandoned houses are trouble magnets for several reasons, Florence Police Chief Anson Shells said.

“Anytime someone owns a property and doesn’t take care of it, it creates a problem,” the police chief said.

Prostitution and gangs are the activities most associated with the abandoned houses, Shells said.

There have been several recent slaying in Florence that took place in or around abandoned houses.

There’s also the danger officers face when they have to go in and clear out such houses where they face danger from the people in the house as well as the house itself.

“Some of those homes are pretty run down and there’s always the danger of stepping through a floor or onto something that would cause injury,” Shells said.

One theory in law enforcement – the Broken Window Syndrome—is the mere appearance a community has been left to deteriorate more than doubles the chance criminal activity will occur in that community, Shells said.

“Fixing these properties, or removing them, would fix the broken window syndrome,” Shells aid.

“I hope they clean up the neighborhood, get all these abandoned houses torn down,” Smith said.

SOLUTIONS

“The ideal solution would be one of two things. Either fix the properties or remove the properties,” Shells said.

Either one would increase property values of surrounding homes and pump more tax revenue into the city’s coffers.

Those two solutions are very much what Davis is looking at doing – one area at a time.

The city has an affordable housing program that includes down payment and closing cost assistance.

That program builds on lots and such that are abandoned and taken by the city.

Abandoned houses are a hindrance to the program, though, Davis said.

“It’s hard to convince someone to buy an $80,000, $90,000 or $100,000 house when there’s a house literally right next door that’s falling down and we have all sorts of illegal activities going on,” Davis said.

To work around that, Davis focuses on neighborhoods rather than individual houses.

Davis’ office worked on the Stackley Street neighborhood shortly after the turn of the century, cleaned it up and build nine new homes that were sold to homeowners who met income and situational qualifications.

“Working in a specific and targeted area will give us more bang for our buck,” Davis said.

To help hold the line in other neighborhoods, Davis said he works with church and civic organization to clean up and spruce up the areas.

“When we start cleaning up, the neighbors start cleaning up around their houses,” Davis said.

The city has more carrots than sticks when it comes to solving some of these problems, the mayor and Davis both said.

“We could give a density bonus for a builder to build additional units in a higher yield area such as South Florence or West Florence, provided they reinvest in North Florence or East Florence,” Davis said.

Both Davis and Wukela said the city would consider being an “anchor tenant” in some of the areas with a high concentration of abandoned houses.

One such development could happen at the former site of Bush’s Recycling on North Irby Street, Wukela said.

“I think a major expenditure of government funds to put a facility there would be a great benefit to the north side of town,” Wukela said.

Wukela said another solution being put into place is the tax incremental funding (TIF) district which allow increased tax revenue generated by improvements to neighborhoods to be spent for additional improvements in those neighborhoods.

One such district in place now is for Downtown Florence, the mayor said.

That district already has the new Drs. Bruce and Lee Library, the Florence Little Theatre and the under-construction FMU performing arts center in it.

All three are facilities that could attract others to build, or locate, downtown.

One solution the city is not looking at would involve it getting into the real estate business, Wukela said.

“It’s not the city’s role to try to get involved in real estate and turn a profit,” Wukela said.

“The city’s job is to be a backstop and prevent nuisance.”