At left, Crystal Surdyk, city director of development, is pictured with Brent Sheldon, R-Ward I. Surdyk updated the City Council’s Housing Committee on open code violation cases. P-J photo by Eric Tichy

More than half of the city’s open code cases deal with exterior maintenance violations.

Crystal Surdyk, city director of development, recently provided members of the City Council’s Housing Committee an update on open code violation cases. She said there are 976 current cases, which range from unregistered vehicles and junk and debris to high grass and condemned properties.

At present, 503 of the open cases are categorized under exterior maintenance, with another 261 considered condemned property cases.

Surdyk again praised Bronson Abbott and Ryan Richter, the city’s two certified code enforcement officers, who have had to shoulder the violations themselves since April. In the last 12 months, 317 cases were closed, meaning a code violation was either resolved or compliance was met.

“I know I’ve been saying it, but they have just been crushing it,” she said of Abbott and Richter. “I’m very proud of the work they’ve done.”

Two additional code enforcement officers are expected to complete their training by the first week of December. Surdyk said she looks forward to having a full complement of officers to tackle the growing list of cases.

“We’re very excited about that,” she said of the two new code enforcement officers.

Surdyk said the Department of Development will “put together a strategy” on how to ease the new members into the open caseload.

“We obviously don’t want to give them the most complicated cases right off the bat,” she said. “So we’ll look at giving them some of the junk and debris, high grass — that sort of thing. Those are going to start to come to a close anyways as the winter starts to come in and the snow starts to cover things.”

She said the new code enforcement officers also won’t be on-call 24/7 to start. That will be to ensure they’re not overwhelmed.

“We will not send them out to the wolves in their first couple of months,” Surdyk said, later adding, “They have been doing fantastic. They have scored very highly on their exams. They both have great intuition, and I think that they’re going to do a really great job for us.”