Are your neighbours’ all-night parties making life hell? Help may be on the way from City

By MEL ROTHENBURGER

ANALYSIS — Ever get tired of drug-dealing neighbours who party hardy until all hours, play loud music, drag race up and down your street, and generally make life hell?

City Hall may have an answer for you.

Kamloops is taking a close look at a Nanaimo bylaw that might be technically illegal but has proven effective for more than a decade. It’s called the “nuisance abatement” bylaw and it’s aimed at curbing all of the bad-neighbour activities described above.

The Nanaimo regulations are actually two separate bylaws that work in tandem. Basically they give the city’s council the power to black list a property and force payment of any costs resulting from anti-social behavior.

For example, say a neighbor complains about a loud party going on next door. A police cruiser comes to check it out. Things look like they’re getting out of hand, so the constable calls it in and the RCMP superintendent shows up to supervise.

He decides he better call the fire chief, who arrives with an aerial truck.

That’s all fiction, and sounds exaggerated, but under Nanaimo’s bylaw all those components could result in some big costs for the homeowner or renter.

It works like this. If a particular residence, or even commercial property, is the subject of a growing number of emergency calls, it can be declared a nuisance property.

Under Nanaimo’s bylaws, a nuisance is “an activity which substantially and unreasonably interferes with a person’s use and enjoyment of a public area or of land he or she occupies or which causes injury to the health, comfort or convenience of an occupier of land and, if it does so, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, may include, an activity such as a noisy party, a group of people making noise, loud music, car racing, revving engines, yelling, shouting, screaming, fighting, littering and trespassing.”

And the bylaw gives the City the authority to recover costs of “abating a nuisance” from the person causing the problem, the renter of the property in which the problem occurs, or the owner.

Those costs can be substantial, up to $10,000 in one case but usually much lower. Each and every cost is itemized and billable. For example, that constable would be billed at $29.50 an hour or any quarter hour thereof, and his cruiser would up the tab by $17.14 an hour (presumably, the pennies would be rounded up).

The top cop would cost you another $51 an hour, the fire chief $60.50 an hour, and that aerial fire truck $150. (The RCMP superintendent might be wondering why he’s worth less than the fire chief or even the public works manager, who is charged out at $57.50, but we digress.)

Slapping the landlord with the costs is a concern for Coun. Tina Lange, who owns several rental properties herself and knows about problems landlords can have with tenants. It’s hard to evict them.

But Kamloops corporate services and community safety director Dave Duckworth says other cities have had success getting evictions within 72 hours when nuisances occur.

And, in practice, few charges are ever assessed. Mostly, things are worked out before it comes to that, though landlords have to work hard to get their problem properties taken off the nuisance list once they’re on it.

It’s that nuisance declaration by City council that empowers the City to recover costs. A Nuisance Property Committee that includes RCMP, bylaw services, B.C. Hydro and government ministries looks at complaints by neighbours.

Of the several dozen cases per year that come before the Nanaimo committee, only a couple are passed on to Council for nuisance designation. The bylaws are more a deterrent than a weapon that’s ever triggered.

In addition to cost recovery, violators can be fined up to $2,000 per offence, though the basic fine starts at $150.

While drug and criminal activity are the most egregious situations, you can come under the long arm of the nuisance laws if your yard is strewn with garbage or if you’re caught urinating in public, too.

Other cities have followed Nanaimo’s example, though Duckworth says Nanaimo’s bylaws may be subject to a court challenge if anybody wanted to try, because they were written before the Community Charter — which overrides civic regulation — came into effect several years ago.

The general opinion on Nanaimo’s approach is that it isn’t the whole solution but it works pretty well.

Two residents who appeared before council on Tuesday asking City council to adopt a bylaw like Nanaimo’s are tired of drug dealing on their street, but a new bylaw would help with the eternal problem of noisy parties, too.

For example, one Westmount Drive residence was the subject of 15 noise complaints between Feb. 20 and March 29 this year. Despite RCMP issuing several tickets, the noise continued. Finally, police got a warrant and seized the renters’ $4,000 stereo system, then recommended mischief charges.

The noise bylaw provides for a $100 fine for disturbing “the quiet, peace, rest, enjoyment, comfort, or convenience of individuals or the public” with loud stereos, barking dogs, idling trucks and such, but has proven hard to enforce — by the time the complaint is laid and action taken, the noise is gone.

Or, as in the Westmount case, the tickets are just ignored.

Besides the noise bylaw, Kamloops already has some others that are useful when it comes to nuisance situations. There’s one on unsightly premises, and another on the use of controlled substances in a residence.

The controlled substances bylaw was implemented in 2005 to give police and the City more clout in dealing with crack houses. It also makes reference to nuisances. It, too, was borrowed from other cities, and allows the City to cut off electricity, water and natural gas to an offending residence, and force the owner to eliminate the hazardous situation.

A new nuisance bylaw would fill in some gaps, like those rowdy parties.