Karl McCollester (00:05)
Welcome to Mighty Municipalities, the podcast about small municipalities and how they can punch above their weight. I'm your host, Karl McCollister, and along with my co-host, Mark Parton, and our guests, we take you through the highs and lows of working in the small municipality. Whether it's the hardship and frustration that is holding you back or the progress and wins that are propelling you forward, we're here to share the lessons learned and give you strategies to help improve your community. Mark, how are you doing?

Mark Partin (00:29)
doing great looking outside on this Friday afternoon and it's a little cloudy but Friday afternoons are always bright days.

Karl McCollester (00:37)
That's very

true. Plus, yeah, this weather is not hurting despite the cloudiness. And I'm excited to say we have our first guest. Welcome.

Mark Partin (00:45)
We have John Macloskey with us today and he's the codes enforcement director. So for the city of Sumter or so John, just tell us a little bit about yourself.

John Macloskey
First of all, thank you all for having me. It's a pleasure on this Friday afternoon. My name is John Macloskey. I'm the code enforcement director for the city. Like you said, I've worked for the city since 2009. Prior to that, I was in manufacturing for about 20 years. Yeah.

Mark Partin
John, this isn't necessarily our topic today, but what drew you from manufacturing to local government work?

John Macloskey
Initially, it was the stress of the manufacturing world. But it is an interesting story. was actually, I had a code enforcement complaint on my house in the historic district and I protested it.

vehemently and long story short, the city manager ended up coming to my door to apologize to me. And that's how I met Deron and we sat and talked and he asked me then if I would think about if I'd ever thought about working for a municipality and that's what kind of kicked it all off. Interesting. Yeah. Yes.

Karl McCollester (01:48)
That's fantastic. That's great.

So, accidentally by being a participant first.

John Macloskey (01:54)
Exactly. Yeah, I was,

I was one of those citizens who is frustrating when the, the nature of my complaining style. yeah.

Karl McCollester (02:03)
That's awesome. I'm sure you felt it the other way in turn over the years. That's great. So, John, how long were you doing, were you in the codes enforcement program before the Sumter Pride program started and kind of tell us about how that came about.

John Macloskey (02:06)
I was. Exactly.

So the Sumter Pride program actually started before I was here. My understanding is it started back in 2002 and a fellow named Bob Fleury, he's retired now, he directed it then. But we would tear down a few houses a year with a very small amount of our community development block grant funds. We would normally take down.

three or four houses a year, sometimes more than that, just depending on the cost.

Karl McCollester (02:50)
Okay. then, tell us, I guess, before we get into how that's changed over the years, what are the parameters of the Pride program and why would someone want to sign up for it?

John Macloskey (03:06)
the parameters of it, we're, I guess it'd be easier to tell you what we're trying to do with it first. From a code enforcement perspective, we have three main priorities, improving safety and health and improving livability and increasing property values. And dilapidation,

Karl McCollester (03:13)
Great, yes.

John Macloskey (03:28)
abandoned houses, of course that negatively affects all three of those. So what we try to do is we try to identify the worst of the worst abandoned houses so that the city gets the most bang for the buck and residents, the residents get the most bang for the buck. So

It's not like we have a list of people who apply for it and then we work our way down some list. It's we do every four years, we do an abandoned housing survey. We just finished it up a month or so ago. And based on that, we generate a priority list of what properties we think are in the worst condition. And we work off that list. Why a property owner would be interested in it.

It alleviates them of the responsibility of having a potentially unsafe eyesore on their hands.

Karl McCollester (04:24)
That makes sense.

Mark Partin
Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, once a property that's identified and let's assume it's owned by, you know, John Doe or Jane Doe. What are the steps that take place, before the property is actually on the demo list?

John Macloskey (4:48)
Well, first of all, we have to make sure we can find an owner. A lot of the abandoned houses we find are heir property.

So there is not one owner that you can assign it to. Air property, someone died without a will, then all of their heirs have an interest in that property. We can do quiet title actions on something if we want to own the property to find out who all those people are. We found that's a lot of work and our success wasn't all that high with it.

because you're gonna run into one owner that may not wanna do anything with it. But assuming you can find the owner, we approach him, him about the program, and we have them sign a release. From that point forward, we go through our process, which is having an environmental review done. Then we do an asbestos study on it. If there's any asbestos, we remove that. Then we demolish the house.

Sometimes that process takes a lot longer than it sounds like. It's normally a start to finish, assuming we had the funds and we didn't have anything else we were doing. We always have a backlog of people, of houses that people want us to tear down. Assuming no backlog, we're talking about six months, start to finish. And I know just observationally, the actual tear down is a matter of...

days so six months is mostly administrative. It's the environmental review that we're required to have done. We can't do it ourselves. We outsource that through through Santi Lynch's regional council governments. They conduct that and it takes normally three months to get that back. Then we contract out the environmental work and then we bid out the

John Macloskey (06:28)
the demo work. When we do a bid package, it typically stays out there for three or four weeks, allow enough people to see it, know that it's there, bid on it. Then we have the bid opening. then once we assign that work to somebody after we have a contract with them, they may be doing other work somewhere else. we tend to get better pricing when we allow contractors to

schedule us at their convenience. ⁓ And bear in mind, we have a small amount of money with Sumter Pride and we're trying to get as much done with those funds as possible. And speed is not necessarily a need really, the end result is. The end result. Good.

Karl McCollester (06:57)
Mm-hmm.

Great. So, A, homeowner says they're interested. How do we determine what their share of the demolition payment is and how is the balance funded?

John Macloskey (07:24)
We don't ask the owners normally to pay anything. There is a stipulation in Sumter Pride that is they pay $400 and we take care of the rest. We have the authority to waive that. We typically find that paying that $400

someone is going to be less interested in signing a release if a $400 check has to accompany it. So we typically do not like that money. We're not gonna let that stand in our way of getting that job done.

Karl McCollester (07:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Right,

Yeah, if it's between the two. Yeah, I can see a lot more people being willing to do it if it's free. And they normally keep the property, they keep ownership.

John Macloskey (08:10)
Yeah,

they keep the land, they sign the release that gives us the right to enter on the property, tear the house down and clean it up. And then they own the property and are responsible for the property after that's finished.

Karl McCollester (08:23)
Mm-hmm.

Nice. So over the time, you you said that we were doing three to four houses. when you first came on, how has that changed?

John Macloskey (08:33)
Well, back in 2015, so 10 years ago, we got a grant through the state. Actually, it was US Treasury money, but it was managed through the State Housing Authority. And we would probably call the program called the NIP program, the Neighborhood Improvement Program. And we actually would buy properties with that. And we did.

Over the course of two years, took down, we purchased and took down 98 houses with that program. Then currently we're working off two grants, which are, the process is the same as with the Sumter Pride program. It's funded through HUD, but one of the grants, it's a city county program.

Karl McCollester (09:02)
Wow.

John Macloskey (09:18)
We're managing it for the city and the county. And then the other one is just a city grant. The difference, the only difference in this other than the size of it is that we had to submit a list of all the properties to HUD as part of the grant application. So,

Karl McCollester (09:38)
Mmm, okay.

John Macloskey (09:41)
We can't add any properties to it. So somebody comes to us right now, says, hey, I need this house torn down. I heard you got this grant money. If it's already on the list, fine. But if it's not on that list that we submitted, we can't add it. And we've been filling in with Sumter Pride money ⁓ to address those situations.

Karl McCollester (09:53)
Gotcha.

Okay.

That's great.

Mark Partin (10:04)
So it sounds like in now 24 years of the program from 2002 forward, we're in the hundreds.

John Macloskey (10:07)
It's around 600 houses that we've torn down. Because there were some years of Sumter Pride we tear down 12 houses. know, when you take out, if something doesn't have any asbestos in it, it's a lot cheaper to demo it. yeah, there.

Karl McCollester (10:15)
That's great.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

John Macloskey (10:29)
600 homes in one city, that's tremendous. what, in your opinion, what is the effect of having 600 older homes, dilapidated homes removed? Well, I think if you live next door to it, the effect is huge. We've had, in some of the neighborhoods where we've torn down several houses, we've now started seeing

new houses being built, which I never expected that we would. I knew that was always part of what you need long-term. You can't just tear something down and that's the end of it, but we are. seeing a significant amount of infill development and the city's actually doing RFPs. We've got one out right now that where we still own some of the lots where we demoed houses through that NIP program.

we're having contractors who are bidding on those lots and building new houses. So it's been huge. And occasionally we'll get a thank you from the neighborhoods saying they appreciate us taking it down. More often than not, it's when are gonna do the next one? So yeah.

Karl McCollester (11:36)
That's awesome. Well, what are the goals going forward?

John Macloskey (11:38)
Yeah, what have you done for me lately?

Yeah.

Um, more of the same, I mean, with the grants that we're working on right now, um, our demo costs has been up a little bit on it. So we're not going to be able to tear down as many houses as we thought, but between the city and the county, we're probably going to do about 150 houses with that grant. Now that runs until 2030. So that's not, we're not going to, you know, we did 10 last year on that program. I've got.

Karl McCollester (12:04)
That's great.

Okay.

Mark Partin (12:13)
25 right now that we're working on. Some are in the abatement stage. Some are scheduled to start being demolished as soon as Monday. yeah, that and then the other piece of it that we really haven't talked about is the enforcement piece. We have six code enforcement officers and they're out in the neighborhood every day and they do a lot of demo where

They see a building. It looks structurally unsound, unsafe. It's abandoned. They get with the building official. The building official will go visit the site, write a demolition order, serve it on the owners, and the owners will take it out themselves. So we've done over 100 that way in the last 10 years. So there's a combination of owner demolition as well as city county. City county stuff.

Mark Partin (12:54)
So wow, that's tremendous numbers it sounds like.

Karl McCollester (12:55)
Wow, that's great.

Mark Partin (13:06)
making a difference and you know can say as I've driven around town and seen these various properties torn down and then as you said some have been redeveloped it does make a difference.

John Macloskey (13:15)
There's some streets that we've torn down as much as 30 houses on a single street. Wow. Yeah so I drive around and see empty lots and that's that's where we were.

Karl McCollester (13:27)
That's great. And then how much staff time does it take? Let's say somebody else wanted to start up a program like this. It sounds like we're doing a lot of the work at the city. We're outsourcing the abatement study and everything else. But how much staff time does it take to kind of manage the program?

John Macloskey (13:42)
The Sumter Pride program in itself, it's not huge. We can only use a certain portion of those community development block grant funds for that. And because that's an annual program with a small number of houses, it doesn't take all that much time.

We're fortunate that we have code enforcement officers in the field every day. we don't have to go, we do it every four years, we do the vacant housing survey, but we're not having to be out in the field looking for it. We already know which houses need to come down. that would be, someone' to start this new, I think that would be a large portion of the.

management commitment would be the time it takes to do an inventory of your town. But beyond that, it's not all that much time. It's preparing bid packages, meeting with contractors, making sure the work gets done. Now, when we're doing things the size of the two grants we're working on right now, that is a considerable amount of time. We haven't added staff to do it. We're just doing it.

Karl McCollester (14:27)
Okay.

Sure. Sure.

Right. But it does take time, right? Well, that's great. If someone wanted to reach out to you, like, hey, what does your bid templates look like for that? And how are you structuring that with a cog to do the abatement? How can they reach you?

John Macloskey (15:02)
803-468-0109. That's my phone number. ⁓

Karl McCollester (15:04)
Great. Awesome.

And we'll direct them to the website, the city website as well. Great. Anything else you want to add, John?

John Macloskey (15:11)
There go. Yeah.

Well, mean, anybody who has, I always try to tell people that's anybody who has a complaint or a comment about a condition of a property, they can log onto our website. There's a, there's a complaint button they can hit and they can fill out what information. And even if that, we get all sorts of things on there. Even if that's just, can you call me about the demolition program? We respond to all of them. So.

Karl McCollester (15:37)
Right. That's a great idea. So that we can point to that site as well. Cool.

Mark Partin (15:43)

Yeah, outside of the demolition program, John, can you tell us a little bit about what codes enforcement faces every day? What type of things they deal with? \

John Macloskey (15:50)
They deal with everything from this building needs to be torn down to your grass is too tall. They're out interacting with the public every every day. We try to even though we're having we have a

potentially adversarial situation on our hands. We're telling somebody there's something wrong with their property. We try to do it with a smile on our face, be polite. We tend to get better results when we do that that way. We try not to write tickets, although code enforcement officers can write tickets and get people in court. We try to do it without that. Try to get property owners to voluntarily do what we're asking. give them a cut. Anytime we give somebody a notice, we show them where the

What the ordinance says. In 2025 they addressed 1300 different violations of all sorts across the city of those 1200 of them were closed out so. Lower around 92%. Closure rate. Hopefully the other ones will be closed out this year. Maybe those are complaints we got at the end of the year, something like that.

Karl McCollester (16:56)
Awesome.

John Macloskey (17:03)
So

there's always a lag, but yeah, we're fortunate and then we've got some really good people who are critical thinkers who know how to interact with the public in a way that they begin with the end in mind. They know what they want to accomplish. It's not trying to write somebody a ticket or get them in trouble. What they're trying to do is this is a violation of an ordinance that city council passed and

It's our job to enforce those ordinances, so we want to get it fixed. So. Yes. Alright.

Mark Partin (17:45)
Just thank you to you and your team, not only for the demolition program, but for the codes enforcement in general, because it does make a difference and it takes a special person to face complainers every day. so thank you to you and your staff for what you do and in helping make our community a better place.

John Macloskey (17:50)
Well, thank you all. I appreciate it.

Karl McCollester (17:58)
Yeah, absolutely. It's not a thankless job because a lot of people do appreciate it, especially the ones who putting in the complaints, but it can be a very difficult So, great. Well, with that, we have a few grants that are coming up that we wanted to let everybody know about. One, T-Mobile has their hometown grants coming up. They do 25 towns per quarter up to 50K. The Favreau Historic Preservation Grant.

that is due March 2nd, so that's coming out real fast, is for 15K annually. And then for our folks who are listening from the Western states, the Bureau of Reclamation Water Storage Grants does a up to 30 million around water reclamation and water storage for y'all. Up in New York, the New York State Records Management Grant, so this is interesting, where they give up to 75K to municipalities looking to digitize their documents or do document protection like that.

And then the last one is the AmeriCorps program applications are due 3-31. And Mark, I don't know if you've ever dealt anything with AmeriCorps.

Mark Partin (19:00)
not on the official administrative side, but I've worked with some of the volunteers on different projects.

Karl McCollester (19:06)
With this coming up, I was trying to figure out exactly how it works. in general, AmeriCorps members receive somewhere around a minimum of a 20K allowance per year. The city pays for it, but AmeriCorps reimburses up to 76 percent, up to 25,000. And that's both in program funds and in the funds to the member. So if you think about it in general, you'd be spending eight thousand dollars.

per AmeriCorps member to do a program. And you just have to define exactly what that program is and what kind of results you expect out of it and things like that. So if you're looking for a way to increase your staff, especially on the service side around things like codes management, around things like community development.

The idea of being able to pay $8,000 and get a full-time staff member for a year sounds like not a bad deal for some of our smaller municipalities. So definitely encourage people to look at that. And that's due at the end of March. And we'll put all of those links, of course, on our site.

With that, gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. John, thanks so much for joining us. And look forward seeing you all at our next one. Thanks. Bye.

Mark Partin (19:57)
Yes, right.

Thank you, and we'll see you soon, Karl.

Bye.