OTISFIELD – Selectman Mark Cyr wants the town to start taking a more proactive approach on code enforcement issues, particularly the problem of illegal junkyards.
He suggested at Wednesday’s meeting that the board meet with Code Enforcement Officer Rodney Smith sometime in April to outline the changes they’d like to see.
Cyr said Smith’s job all too often has been one of after-the-fact enforcement, instead of monitoring compliance on permits as they are issued.
He said there are a lot of junkyards in town that are not licensed, and he’d like to see Smith track these sites down over the course of the summer. All too often, he said, nothing is done until someone complains.
Cyr also would like the town to obtain its own source of diesel fuel. There would be a savings in doing so, he said, since the town would not have to pay taxes on the fuel. He said setting up a pump, either at the transfer station or the fire station, would cost around $10,000 and would have environmental safeguards as well.
Resident Gordon Chamberlain has brought attention to the junkyard problem in the past several years. At Wednesday’s meeting, Chamberlain asked whether the town had followed up on the plan to have photos taken of existing licensed junkyards to see if they have complied with the town’s requirement that they be screened from the road.
Head Selectman Lenny Adler said he’d gotten several calls from residents recently complaining that Chamberlain hasn’t done anything about the junk on the front of his property.
A public hearing on Chamberlain’s junkyard application has been set for Feb. 16.
“If you want to have credibility, you need to get your own house in order,” Adler told Chamberlain. “Your (junkyard) is as bad as anybody.”
Chamberlain replied, “What are you going to do about it?” He has said that he placed the junk in plain view on his property to make a point about lack of junkyard enforcement in town.
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