Evesham Township is working toward taking possession of two abandoned properties, and director of community development Nancy Jamanow gave an update on the status of process at the May 27 Council meeting.
Jamanow started by giving a brief history of the township’s abandoned property ordinance, which the council passed in October 2012.
At the time, a list of 42 properties were identified as abandoned, with that list later reduced to the current number of 27 due to owners repairing and cleaning up the properties or selling them to those who would.
Jamanow said the township is focusing on two specific properties, 92 Kent Ave. and 38 Yale Road, to follow the whole process through to see what complications the township might encounter while attempting to take possession of the properties.
“Notices were posted at both of these properties as well since both of them we know to not be lived in,” Jamanow said. “These notices also indicate that the township will file a complaint with superior court to gain possession of the property. The earliest this complaint can be filed with the county is June 23.”
Mayor Randy Brown later asked township solicitor John Gillespie to explain for those in attendance why the process of acquiring the property had to take so long.
Gillespie said the law requires the township to go through a specific process of notifying those with an interest in the property of the township’s intentions.
With the Yale Road property, the owner has passed away, there is no will, and no one was named executor administrator of the estate. The interested parties are now those who hold multiple tax liens and tax sale certificates on the property.
“There are two federal tax liens on the property and three tax sale certificates that were purchased on the property, so with interest having accumulated, particularly at the federal rate, there’s probably about $40,000 to $50,000 of liens on the property,” Gillespie said. “Those lienors have an interest in the property so they had to get notice of our intention.”
Gillespie said further complicating matters is that normally when a township files suit to acquire a property, it would present a plan to the court specifically detailing how the township plans to secure, stabilize and repair the property.
However, as of the May 27 meeting, the township had yet to acquire access to the property to perform an inspection and draft such a plan.
“That’s why we have to file the notices,” Gilliespie said. “That’s why we have this pre-suit notification process that we’ve followed, it’s why we’re going to go into court with an order to show cause and have them show cause why we shouldn’t be allowed to inspect this property, come up with a stabilization plan, or if the inspection reveals that demolition is warranted, why we shouldn’t be allowed to demolish it. That’s their due process.”
Several residents who live near the Yale Road property spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting, expressing their distress and concerns over the property.
Mary Ellen Walls, of Jay Court, said she was glad to hear the township is doing something about the problem because it has been going on for so long.
“Recently, I was up on the house-next-door’s step looking over and I was thinking to myself I don’t know how anybody in the world could live next-door to something like this, because it’s frightening,” Walls said. “It’s not just a beat up old house; it looks like a house of horrors. It’s terrible, and we’ve learned recently that the man that lived there was a hoarder. It’s full of cardboard boxes. It could be a fire hazard.”
Walls and other residents who spoke also mentioned a family of raccoons living at the property that have been seen by multiple area residents during the day, indicating the possibility of them being rabid.
Rich Duda, who lives next-door to the property, corroborated the account of the previous tenant being a hoarder.
“If you look in the front windows, if you go on the porch you can literally see boxes stacked up,” Duda said. “The guy is a hoarder. His ex-wife when he died came over and filled six industrial trash cans out of his car, so you can imagine what the house is like.”
Brown sympathized with the residents’ concerns, and said he wouldn’t want to live anywhere near such a serious safety hazard. He said he’d work to have the township do whatever it can to deal with the property as fast it can, but ultimately it would have to follow statutes as written by the state.
“At the end of the day, we’re still spending your money,” Brown said. “If we were to go there and perform something illegal on that property, and then it turns out it costs you that taxpayers a quarter-million-dollars to remedy, there will be a lot of unhappy people considering we’re looking at 20-plus homes just on this first list.”
