It’s been disheartening to read the series of inaccurate and misleading opinion pieces published in The Union by Tom Durkin and Pauli Halstead. Contrary to their assertions, County staff work hard to protect our community’s health and safety and treat residents with respect and compassion in the process.
When it comes to enforcing state and local building regulations, Nevada County is “complaint driven.” That means that residents, not County staff, are the ones to initiate a complaint against a property owner who they believe is out of compliance with the community standards in their neighborhood. While not all complaints are founded, health and safety complaints are prioritized for investigation by Code staff.
In July 2022, the County received a complaint about a property that had unpermitted mobile homes and a recreational vehicle (“RV”) with improper sewage disposal. Code staff confirmed the complaint, which is in a residential neighborhood zoned to limit development to one primary residence and no more than one permitted accessory dwelling unit (ADU or “Granny unit”).
In addition to the main residence, Code staff found four households renting unpermitted dwellings with a variety of code violations. Code staff organized a meeting with the property owner, the tenants, and County housing case workers. Coordination between Code staff and housing case workers is nothing new when unsafe conditions exist. This is a well-established practice on the rare occasion when Code staff encounter tenants in unsafe housing conditions such as were found in this case: hazardous electrical wiring that could cause a fire, unpermitted sewage system that could pollute waterways, and gas leaks that endangered children and pets.
By September 2022, the property owner, who was represented by their attorney, negotiated a six-month plan to bring the property into compliance. The property owner also agreed to waive rent for the current tenants if they remained on the property for those six months (minus utilities as requested by the property owner) until March 2023. No structures were “red-tagged” as unfit for habitation. No one was evicted. No one made homeless.
As of January 2023, well before the March deadline, all four households have found new housing. One household purchased a permitted home. Another bought land. The two other households have interim housing and County case workers will continue to assist them in finding permanent housing. In conversations with our staff, they’ve expressed appreciation to the County for stepping in.
It’s regrettable that Durkin and Halstead have created a false choice to their readers: either prevent homelessness or protect health and safety. From what we hear, our community doesn’t buy into this dichotomy: we must collaborate to do both.
Situations where people must move from an unsafe or hazardous housing situation are few and far between, but in those cases, we go above and beyond to connect people to needed resources. We’ve long centered our work around meeting our customer’s needs but believe we can always learn and do better.
In recent years, we’ve leaned into supporting people who live in insecure or unsafe housing by creating a navigator program with Connecting Point to help people access the multitude of services to get them housed. We will be expanding this partnership to enhance the support when Code Compliance is faced with an unsafe housing situation.
Over the past decades, Nevada County has established development standards that follow State building code for health and safety, respect property rights, and reflect community standards designed to protect our rural quality of life. At the same time, the County has made preventing homelessness and increasing the supply of affordable housing a priority.
Well intentioned people recognize these values are not in conflict.
Trisha Tillotson is the Nevada County Community Development Agency Director, which includes Code Compliance. Ryan Gruver is the Nevada County Health and Human Service Director, which includes homeless/housing services.
