City Administrator Thomas A. Palamar will be in State College today to promote Pottsville's Quality of Life program and its war on blight.
He will be one of the guest speakers at the Pennsylvania Building Officials Conference at 1 p.m. at the Ramada Conference and Golf Hotel, State College.
More than 100 code officials from across the state will be in attendance, Gil Longwell, PENNBOC administrator, Mechanicsburg, said Wednesday. The conference began Wednesday and will end Friday, according to the PENNBOC website at pennboc.org.
The theme of the conference is "training to meet your needs," Jeff Shultz, a member of the conference committee and a code official in East Pennboro Township, said on the website.
"The committee was not satisfied with the 'off-the-shelf' training available, so we defined topics and crafted contents that met our needs," Shultz said.
"We reasoned that if we crafted training that we would want to attend, code officials from across the commonwealth would feel the same way," Shawn Lechene, a code enforcement officer from Fairview Township and a member of the conference committee, said on the website.
At a planning meeting in February, PENNBOC discussed problems second- and third-class cities were having with blight and decided to seek out experts in the field, Longwell said.
"We found out about Pottsville and its blight program through peer referrals. We talked to municipal code officials and community development directors. There were conversations where we'd say, 'Hey, have you seen what so-and-so is doing?' " Longwell said.
"It just goes to show you when the word starts getting out on things, good or bad, in this case it's a good thing we're trying to do, the word got to them. And this man called me and said it would be something interesting for the attendees, and we're glad to share," Palamar said.
In April 2012, Pottsville Mayor John D.W. Reiley made an effort to eliminate blight in the city and established the Pottsville Blight and Nuisance Task Force, a team of city officials and community representatives.
To date, the task force has made a list of 383 properties and so far, 370 have been assessed, Palamar said.
On Sept. 10, 2012, the council approved Ordinance 820, giving public officers the power to issue tickets for code enforcement violations.
To date, 175 of these "Quality of Life" tickets have been issued, 91 have been paid, 21 remain unpaid, five appeals were granted, five appeals were denied and 48 tickets have been turned into citations, Palamar said.
"Code and health officers report a lower rate of repeat offenses after Quality of Life tickets have been issued," Palamar said at the council's September meeting Monday.
Longwell contacted Palamar in March.
"After the conversation with Tom, it became apparent that he could bring to our conference podium messages that might not be heard anywhere else generally, and that we wanted to provide to our members. He's able to provide that unique, not available anywhere else kind of insight. And I would imagine he will also be providing some lessons on things that not only work, but don't work," Longwell said.
"I'll be talking about our journey, and I can talk about strategies of how we dealt with problem properties in the past and how we do things differently now," Palamar said.
Palamar plans to speak for 30 minutes. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to do a PowerPoint at the conference today, but said he'd take the material along.
In recent months, Palamar and members of the task force have been offering the public information about the city's blight fight through power point presentations at monthly city council meetings.