Code Enforcement - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon, everybody. It is five o'clock and we are going to call to order the Public Safety Council Committee meeting of the City of Jonesboro. First on our agenda today is our roll call. And if you will denote your attendance on the device in front of you. Okay, I do show that we have seven members present and in attendance, which gives us a quorum. So we will proceed to the next item on our agenda, being the approval of minutes from the Tuesday, June 16th meeting.

Move to adopt. Second.

Okay, I have a motion and a second to adopt the minutes as presented. Do I have any questions or comments from anybody on the committee? Okay, seeing none, we will call a vote on this item. Okay, that item does carry. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate you. Moving on to our next item on the agenda, being ordinances to be introduced, beginning with ordinance 26024, an ordinance to the city of Jonesboro to place various traffic signs at determined location, designated locations determined by the Traffic Control Committee. Now, therefore it be ordained by the City Council of the City of Jonesboro, Arkansas, that the following changes be made as recommended by the Traffic Control Committee. Installing a stop sign at the following location, Hanson Street at Crockett Drive, Hanson Street at Milo Court, both north and south, Hanson Street at Young Drive, Milo Court at Jordan Street, Jordan Street at Crockett Drive, and Jordan Street at Young Drive, both north and south, along with establishing a 25-mile-an-hour speed limit at the following locations, being West Country Club Terrace.

I'll make a motion. Move forward to full council. OK.

I have a motion to forward to full council. Do I have a second?

I'll second.

Okay, I have a motion and a second to forward this item onto full council. Do I have any questions or comments from anybody on the committee? Anything from administration? And anything from the public in attendance? Okay, seeing none, we'll go ahead and we will call a vote on this item. Okay, and we do have six yes votes on this item, so this item does pass and will be forwarded on to full council. Bringing up the next item on our agenda being resolution 26072. Resolution by the City Council of the City of Jonesboro, Arkansas to condemn property located at 2210 Willow Road, Jonesboro, Arkansas, 72401. Parcel number 01-1442-7105-300.

Move forward to full council.

Second. OK. I have a motion and a second to forward this item on to full council. Do I have any questions from anybody on the committee? OK. Any from the administration? And any from the public in attendance?

OK.

Seeing none, we will go ahead and we will call a vote on this item. Okay, and I do show six votes in favor of this item, so this will forward on to full council. Thank you, everybody. This brings us to our next item on the agenda, being number five, pending items. I know of none. And brings us up to our next item on the agenda, being other business. And I believe that we have a representative from Vector Mosquito Control to come up and speak to us about our mosquito abatement program. Thank you, Mr. Sharp.

Good afternoon. I just wanted to give everyone, to kind of get everyone caught up on where we are on the season, where we stand. What you have in front of you is the flight maps for July. The only one that's not in there is the one we flew on July 1st, and that was just ASU and Nettleton, Baptist Church at the fairgrounds and the Country Club and Joe Mack. But the other ones you have in front of you is just a sample of what we've, well, it's what we've done in June. The one on July the 16th shows us going out approximately one and a half miles south and southwest of the city limits. So that kind of gives you an idea um of actually the area that we flew over the rice there's really not that much rice out there but there is there is some rice so and it it only takes one or two fields to get a hatch going this heat is not only taking a toll on us but it's also stressing out the mosquitoes so that's good in a way Our light traps have been down for the last couple of weeks, but I know they're getting stressed out because it's so hot. But with cooler weather predicted for the next, well, maybe tomorrow if we're lucky, we may get a few more caught in the traps, and we'll go from there and see what we need to do. I'll bring you up to date from July 1 to July 17th. We had a total of 610 spray miles. Now, you'll get this in your July report. I just wanted to bring everyone up to date to now. We treated 22,000 acres. This is by on the trucks now, not the aircraft. We had 36 service requests to adulticide residents, also the ballparks. and any other special events like barbecues, weddings, and so on. We took care of that. So far we've had four aerial applications in July, which gives us a total of six. And we do eight consecutives, then we go from there. The next scheduled flight hopefully is scheduled for the 29th and 30th of the end of the month. Larvae siting has been kind of hit and miss. With the rain we, excuse me, we inspected nine sites and only four sites had actual larvae. We put out 26 pounds of larvae siting to stop them where they live, in other words. The service request here in the last week have really went down a lot. But like I said, the mosquitoes are stressed, just like we are. And that's about it. I won't take much more of your time. I just wanted to come and give everyone an update. just to let y'all know I'm not hiding. Y'all have any questions?

Yes, sir. Mr. Stark, I did have one for you, if you didn't mind. I was noticing on the June report, I don't know if you have those numbers in front of you or not, but I was a little confused if there was reasoning behind this or if it was just an error on the tabulation, but it showed in the year over year between June 25 to June 26 that the number of mosquitoes collected was down from from 1,772 to 476. However, in the total average mosquito collected column in June of 25, when the number was almost three times higher, that it reflected 4.86 mosquitoes per trap, but in June of 26, it's 14.87.

It might have been a typo. I don't have it. I'll check on it in the morning and let you know.

Sounds good. I didn't know if there was a bigger concentration per number of traps.

It sounds like a typo to me. I thought you were going to say that mosquitoes were a little less this year, and they are. They are less in the traps. They started out that way, mainly because of the irrigation of the rice, which is not near the rice there was, because of the price of urea diesel. And also the price of rice is down. So a lot of farmers went to corn, soybeans, milo, whatnot, cotton. So now I don't know what next year will bring. It may be all rice next year.

Gotcha. Definitely playing to our advantage today, right? Right. Is there questions from anybody else on the committee for Mr. Starr?

Mr. Chairman?

Yes, sir. Has staffing been a problem much this year? It feels like in past years, you said we had problems getting pilots and getting truck drivers and stuff. Have you been able to stay fully staffed this year?

We have pilots. Truck drivers are an issue. We can get them, but we don't keep them. I don't know what's so hard about it. Maybe it's just, you know, you work, you know, 7 o'clock to midnight or 1. But, yeah, like I said, we get them trained up and they leave. You know how that is. It takes a week or two to get them trained up, and then they're gone, and you've got to start all over.

When you're shorthanded, how do you still get the work done? Do you just have people working more?

I use my day people at night. That's how we do it. Unfortunately. So they're tired. Everybody's tired, but – Hopefully in a couple months we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully.

Yes, sir. Any questions for anybody else on the committee?

Okay, thank y'all so much. I will be back in September, hopefully to wrap it up and give you maybe an overall report. Hopefully the early rice should start draining about the end of August. And when that happens, we'll see a drastic decrease, hopefully. Okay.

Good report. Thank you, Mr. Stark.

You got something, Chris? You're looking awful serious.

I was just thinking it is pretty amazing. I don't think the mosquitoes have been as bad this year, and I'd never considered the fact that most of the farmers had swapped to corn and cut back on the rice, but that just verifies our earlier conversation of we need to figure out how we can treat some of the rice fields outside the city limits.

Yes. Like I said, we did fly outside the city limits out southwest, but like I said, there's not near the rice that I've seen in the past. You know, Johnsboro averages 14, 15,000 acres of rice. That's an inch down. we're way past half that, if not less. But like I said, it only takes a couple fields to get a hatch off. And if you might have noticed too, I have, you'll get a hatch, it takes us three or four days to get them down, and then you don't see anything for a while, then you'll get another hatch. Now, if we got 14,000 acres of rice, they're hatching every day, every day, and that's what we've looked at in the past. So this year's a little better as far as the bugs are concerned, but like I said, next year may be something totally different. Thank y'all, I appreciate y'all, thank you. Thank you.

All right, good information. Thank you once again to Mr. Stark from Vector Mosquito Control for coming to talk to us today. This brings us to our next item on the agenda being public comments. This is an opportunity for anybody from the general public that wants to come up and speak about anything other than what was on the agenda already today.

If nobody's going to take that, I'd like to ask something real quick. I see some of my neighbors here trying to figure out how do we resolve Airbnb parties that are going throughout the city? We had a huge party in our neighborhood. Somebody rented it, said it was one thing, turned out to be something else. And I think the party went from late at night to way early in the morning, huge crowd. I know it's a problem across the country and not just Jonesboro, so what can we do, how can we do something? I don't know if Chief, if anybody started working on anything.

Well, Bryan Richardson and I met with some of your neighbors that I see out here and talked about what options we may have and we are working on some changes to our privilege license ordinance. We already have teeth in our, short-term rental ordinances. The problem is, and I reached out to, on the city attorney listserv, as I told them I would do, to try to get input from other cities about how they are handling it, because places like Bella Vista and Hot Springs that have a lot of short-term rentals, and what I've determined is the places that have had success, because tracking them becomes the problem, too. We don't even have a way to know where they are if they don't come in and get their privilege license, because if you booked on Airbnb, you don't find out the address until you put your credit card in. You get a picture of the house, so I guess we could have employees that drive around and look for the houses that they see the picture of in the general area where they're selected, but it's hard to locate them if they're not honest and following our ordinance and coming in and applying for a privilege license, number one. Until there's a problem, then we know. But secondly, what I found out from those cities, and I don't think I've even talked to Brian about this yet, is that they've hired a company to do it, but it's like $80,000 a year to track these short-term rentals. And I don't know how to figure out if Jonesboro has the capacity of them to make that worth it. to make that expense worth it. I mean, we're not Bella Vista. We're not Hot Springs where you would think they have huge numbers of short-term rentals. I don't know if we're there yet where that expenditure would be, you know, something that we would even want to consider. Or if it would cost that much. We haven't gotten that far into it yet.

I guess the other thing I'm thinking of, too, is...

But we have things on the books.

Yeah.

to shut them down when the party's happening, of course.

Right, but I guess the other side.

And to pull a privilege license if they have one.

Okay, okay. And how do we handle it on the long-term if somebody, long-term rental, I guess that landlord can handle that, but I'm just trying to figure out a way we can actually have some teeth.

And that was another thing we discussed is, you know, how do you apply some of these rules to short-term rentals and not apply them to long-term rentals and that not be illegal? Because it's the same business.

Yeah.

It's just... renting for a shorter amount of time versus a longer amount of time so these are all things we talked about um but i know we've started working on trying to draft something that puts some teeth in the ability to revoke all privilege licenses depending on if they're violating the law or but we already have some teeth in our short-term rentals it's just you know knowing where they are and and we're looking into the two addresses that they gave us to see what we can do there specifically because we know there have been repeated problems

What can communities do or neighborhoods do? Report it. Because I know some HOAs are out there, so is there anything you can do in the HOA?

If your HOA prevents it, then obviously you can privately sue to prevent it from happening in your neighborhood. But we don't have any way to help you with an HOA. Okay.

Yeah.

But if you know of one in your neighborhood, you could notify us that it's there so we can see if they have a privilege license. Because we just, at the current time, don't have anybody assigned to go out and try to find them all from the collections office. I don't know if there's anything else to add to that. But we're looking at it and trying to add some more teeth to our privilege license ordinance that we'll bring to y'all pretty soon, I hope.

Yeah, I just add that obviously what you hear about is the bad apples, and that's what we need to address is how you actually have a process to address the bad apples without hurting the good actors, because there is a lot of good actors.

Yeah, we're not causing a problem.

We don't want it to be a detriment to a community or to the city or to adjacent neighbors. What's not real clear in our ordinance as it says is what's the establishment for considering somebody to be a bad actor other than just a judgment call. So we kinda like to lay out action one, action two, and that's kinda what we're working on.

And that's for all kinds of privilege licenses. I mean, we do have some guidelines in short-term rentals, We've had some things that made the news recently where businesses weren't operating in accordance with the law, and we would like to put some teeth in there to help us with those situations. However, if you look at our ordinances, there is a section on short-term rentals, and you can see what's in there now, and it does lay out some, here's how you revoke the license, and what inspections are required to operate a short-term rental and to get a privilege license. There's some rules in there that we have. It's just... finding them until they're a problem is the issue. And I think it's an issue everybody has. Like, Bella Vista limits the number that are allowed in the city, and you have to be on a waiting list. If they hit 600, 800, whatever it is, you have to be on a waiting list. Somebody has to drop off before you get on. but when you look at their number and you look at what is just on Airbnb, it almost meets that number and then you know there are people on VRBO and you know, so you know they probably also have some out there that they just don't know about.

They don't know where they are. I guess the other piece too is while we're looking, can we look at limiting the number like that for short-term rentals but then also maybe long-term rentals in neighborhoods? I mean, we'd have to do that. Some cities that do that.

Yeah, I have never seen a city, but I don't know that I've researched long term rentals in that way. But I can certainly look at what they use to limit short term rentals and what law allowed them to do that. Again, I don't know that we're to the numbers that we're. We're certainly not to the numbers of Hot Springs and Bella Vista and Fayetteville, but those were just some of the ones I looked at when we started doing some research and that responded and sent me their ordinances when I asked.

Just out of curiosity on that same topic and going back to an earlier conversation we had many years ago, do we know if the owners of the two properties in question there are local or out of state?

One used to be in a

I think one at least is in-state. Are they both in-state? Yeah, they're both in-state and maybe used to be local, but they're not living local. But our ordinance requires a local representative that the police can contact.

It could be a manager. It could.

Somebody that we can contact and have there to deal with the problem. We have that in our ordinance already.

Thank you for that. Yes, sir. Definitely. All right. Any other comments from the public? Seeing none, that brings us to our final. Oh, yes. Sorry. Yes, ma'am. If you'd like to approach the. Yes, ma'am. Okay. Last call for public comment. Okay. Seeing none, we'll go ahead and move it on to our final item on the agenda being adjournment. Okay. I have a first and a second to adjourn. All in favor?

Aye.

And we stand adjourned. Thank you all