Brookfield may soon require property owners to register any vacant buildings in town with the village.
At the village board’s July 8 committee of the whole meeting, Community Development Director Libby Popovic spoke to trustees about the possibility of implementing an ordinance that would require the owners of vacant buildings in Brookfield to register those properties with the village, enabling village staff to keep an accurate count.
After some discussion following Popovic’s presentation, trustees agreed to have staff draft an ordinance that they will review at their next regular meeting on July 22.
Brookfield now does not have “any effective tracking mechanism” for staff to track which properties in town, both residential and commercial, are vacant, Popovic said. Instead, she said staff has been using indirect methods to assess which properties are vacant, like checking the public works department’s zero-water-usage spreadsheet.
“We use that to see who hasn’t been using water within the last three weeks, as kind of a starting point for the assessment,” she said. “Also, reviewing some of the piles with property maintenance, we determined that there’s probably about 75 known vacant properties and probably 90 plus, total, between commercial and residential.”
Popovic said that a vacant property registration program would have several benefits to the village, like enabling maintenance to keep up a building’s exterior appearance, decreasing crime and vandalism in the area, increasing local stability and property value and generating revenue for Brookfield through the collection of related fees.
The ordinance would also promote public health by allowing staff to prevent vermin infestations and deal with garbage left on properties as well as hold a vacant property’s owner to account for leaving behind an empty building rather than rehabilitating or selling it. Ultimately, if an owner chooses not to register their vacant property, the program will enable Brookfield to fine them for violating a village ordinance.
Popovic told trustees that village staff had surveyed nearby municipalities; they found that Berwyn, Cicero, Maywood, Broadview, Forest Park, Lyons and Elgin all require vacant properties to be registered.
“This isn’t a quick process where you implement it, and then everyone rushes to the counter and registers and then takes care of the buildings, but this allows us a metric to start tracking it,” she said. “My understanding from dealing with three of these municipalities [is that] it has brought the overall vacancy down a certain amount, and it allows them to track it better and keep track of the ones that are out there for public safety and, overall, for redevelopment.”
In her presentation, Popovic specified recommended details for the registration program. Vacant properties would have to be newly registered when ownership changes, and the registration would have to be renewed each year, both at a proposed cost of $200 each time for single-family residential buildings and $500 for commercial or multi-family building registrations. Owners would then have to get their building inspected within 15 days of registering the property and pay a $100 fee if additional inspections are required.
Property owners would also be required to submit a statement of intent describing their plans for the building at the time of registration and formal plan for the building within 60 days.
Trustee Jennifer Hendricks took issue with the requirement for the formal plan, as some new owners of recently vacant properties, like those inheriting land from family members who have died, may wish to take more time before they decide on what to do with the building or land.
“I’m thinking that, in an estate situation, 60 days isn’t necessarily a very long time to decide what a family might want to do with those properties,” she said.
Popovic responded that the village would be willing to work with property owners to extend the deadline or accept a plan with whatever information the owner provides.
“The plan might be, we’re assessing it now. It’s in probate, and we’re not going to be in front of a judge, for example, for 90 days, and we need to extend it,” she said. “Or, it could be, the family is assessing it, and they’re going to sell it within six months. That’s OK. That’s a lot more information than we have right now, which is nothing.”
In cases where a house is under foreclosure or a property stays as part of a recently deceased person’s estate, Popovic said, the bank’s assessor or the estate’s executor, who would be responsible for the property, could act in place of an owner.
Trustee Kit Ketchmark raised the issue that there may be cases where tracking down a property owner or determining a property’s assessor could take a long time or a significant investment of staff work. Popovic agreed that some cases will take longer than others, but that the vacant properties are still worth tracking down.
“We have the mechanism and the tools, because most of [the information about property ownership] is public record,” she said. “Right now, what we’re doing is we’re pulling this information as it is from different resources. This allows us to keep it squarely with the owner, whether that owner is a trustee in a bankruptcy, a bank that owns it, or whether it’s an estate or the actual owner. It’s usually not that big of a mystery; it just takes some time to be able to look through it.”
After more back-and-forth discussion between trustees and Popovic, the members of the village board agreed to have the proposed ordinance come before them once again.
“If there’s an estate that the executor doesn’t want to do anything and has no interest in the property, the alternative is it could sit vacant for two years, and we have no mechanism for penalizing them other than the regular code sections, and this, I think, is just an additional tool,” Village President Michael Garvey said. “I know it’s not going to solve all our problems. It’s not going to cover every case, and I know you’re acknowledging that it will be a case-by-case basis, but I’m glad to see it coming forward.”
