After a spat of violence in its urban core, the Board of Aldermen announced a task force is targeting quality of life issues in the city.
Former Derby Police Chief Andrew Cota, Sr. and Youth Services Director John Saccu discussed the task force with elected officials Wednesday.
The task force is born from youth services and from the city’s blight program, where two part-time officers — Cota and Andrew Moore — identify dilapidated properties.
The information is then passed to the zoning official David Kopjanski, who attempts to bring the property into compliance.
Blight — Saccu and Cota said — is often the tip of the iceberg regarding problems on a given property.
Without naming the specific address, Cota talked about a recent case where blight brought inspectors to a property. Then they discovered an illegal apartment — a person was living in a cellar with no windows.
“That’s a serious violation,” Cota said.
Next, inspectors noticed a bunch of kids hanging around. Officials wondered why they weren’t in school.
Later — after a group of tenants were evicted — officials realized at least one apartment in the residence was seriously overcrowded.
“They threw out 10 mattresses,” Cota said.
Now, members of the task force, in a case like that, would take the information gleamed by the blight inspectors and share it with each other, then decide how to proceed.
Ideally, the task force would be able to target underlying issues causing blight and other quality of life issues, Saccu said.
Example — if a student wasn’t in school — or, if the student wasn’t, in fact, a Derby resident, district officials would get involved.
The task force will comprise representatives from the fire marshal’s office, the building department, the school district, the police department, the housing authority and the Naugatuck Valley Health District.
To the surprise of some Aldermen, Mayor Anthony Staffieri said the task force has been working on its procedure for seven months.
The Valley Independent Sentinel was first told about the task force by Alderman David Lenart after a drive-by shooting on Hawkins Street.
Alderman Barbara DeGennaro asked about freedom of information and wondered whether information from the task force would be made available to the public.
Alderman Beverly Moran wondered whether residents would be able to meet with the task force.
Cota said he didn’t think all the information would be made public, due to its sensitive nature.
Staffieri said that unlike other local committees, the task force has been meeting in-house, at the department-head level.
“Everybody wants to know what we’ve been doing. This is what we’re doing,” Staffieri said.
The City of Danbury, plagued in the early 2000s by illegal and overcrowded apartments, set up a similar task force in its city, called “UNIT,” Unified Neighborhood Inspection Team.”
The UNIT often receives anonymous complaints about properties, triggering a visit from the inspectors. They knock on doors and get permission to enter dwellings.
Mayor Mark Boughton, now running as a Republican for lieutenant governor, directed city staff to post monthly reports on Danbury’s website to keep the activities open to the public.
