AUBURN — The city’s mixed-up book of ordinances is due for a pruning, City Manager Glenn Aho said.
Aho will ask councilors to support a recodification of the city’s ordinances later this month, adopting all of the city’s rules again. It’s part of an ongoing review of the ordinance book that Aho kicked off last summer.
“It’s a dull-sounding project, but the issue behind it is very serious,” Aho said. “If we had to go to court to defend any particular ordinance, I don’t know if we could. I have an ordinance book in my office right now that I have zero confidence in.”
Councilors regularly make changes to city ordinances, tweaking the rules to fit the times or fix new problems. Aho said it’s important for a city to go over the rule books every few years to make sure that the rules are consistent and agree with one another.
“It’s like sand in an hourglass or snow on the ground. If you don’t keep up with it consistently, it accumulates,” Aho said. “And that’s the situation we are in now.”
Aho said Auburn has not reaffirmed its code of ordinances since 1997, and many errors have crept in. The books may not agree from department to department. City Clerk Roberta Fogg said she doesn’t have any confidence in the list of ordinances on the city’s website.
Aho agreed.
“Many of those are PDF files of typewritten pages from the 1980s,” he said. “You can’t tell if something has been updated or not, some pages are in such poor condition.”
It became an issue last summer when the city discovered a conflict with how it collected trash at condominiums. The City Council adopted an ordinance in October 2003, discontinuing the practice of collecting trash at most condo complexes. The city continued collecting trash for about half of the units in the city, however, charging some for the service.
When a group of residents asked the city to begin collecting their trash in May 2010, Aho said staff had a difficult time finding the correct ordinance.
“How can you enforce what’s true and right when your own book is this disheveled?” Aho said.
The city hired Florida’s Municipal Code Corp. to perform the recodification for $17,000. The company will provide printed as well as digital versions.
A draft of the new code of ordinances is available on Auburn’s website in PDF format.
“We hope it will be a labor saver,” he said. “Now if developers want copies of the rules and ordinances that pertain to what they want to do, a staff person has to go through step by step and print them out. With this, we’ll be able to just give them the link.”
Aho said he’ll bring the reorganized and updated book of city ordinances before the City Council at the Jan. 18 meeting for first reading. If they approve it then and at the Feb. 7 meeting, Aho said he’ll have a listing of the city ordinances he can use confidently.
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