Deputy Development Director Kasie Foulk talks with the housing committee about rental inspection letters received from the county. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

In mid-April letters were sent out from Chautauqua County to people regarding rental inspections.

adirector, talked with the City Council’s Housing Committee recently about the letters. There are two separate rental registrations, one for the county and one for the city, Foulk said. The city is specifically in the city limits and the county is the entire 14701 zip code.

“The county’s main focus is lead testing, so any property that is registered as a rental unit and was built before 1980 received this letter,” Foulk said. “We’ve gotten a lot of calls, ‘Well, 20 years ago it was converted back into a single family and we own it.’ Not a problem, it just never got changed at the assessor’s office.”

The data for the rental inspections and letters was pulled by the state from the municipal data centers and so Foulk said there are about 20 inspections lined up for the Department of Development right now. The overall process is simple, she added, saying that they need to get things lined up with Kenny Garcia, building and zoning code officer, who then does a quick walk through to verify it is a single family unit.

“That’s all he’s looking for when he goes into these homes, is that they are owner occupied,” Foulk said. “He’s not going to nitpick and start handing out a bunch of code violations. We are just ensuring it is a single family home, and then he will issue a new certificate of occupancy to reflect that it is a single family home.”

The DOD then goes to the assessor’s office, submits the certificate to them and the property will be updated and removed from the state list. Foulk said they had been getting a lot of questions about this, including if a lead test is still required. She said it is not, but people should always be making sure their house is lead safe.

The city’s inspections are different, and they will be going through and looking for code violations and making sure the unit is habitable. Foulk emphasized that for the other inspection it is to update the list that the state pulled, which has not been updated in decades and to get the property-type updated with the assessor’s office.