City Council okays initiative to make neighborhoods safer for youths

A determination to make neighborhoods safer for youth is spurring a City of Lawton initiative to ramp up condemnation of deteriorating structures, beginning in February.

Mayor Stan Booker went into more detail about the Kid’s First initiative at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, after first announcing it during his New Year’s address on Monday.

Booker said the initiative is a focused effort to make city neighborhoods safer and cleaner for youth by tackling issues such as dilapidated and vacant properties, vagrancy, and litter. Removing deteriorating houses, he said, will make neighborhoods happier and healthier places for children.

It’s something Booker and Ward 1 Councilwoman Mary Ann Hankins agree on, stemming from an incident in a Ward 1 neighborhood where a vacant house was severely damaged by a fire set by a homeless person illegally occupying the structure. Both said the destructive blaze was the second one — a fire was caught before it got out of control two weeks earlier — and Hankins said the incident was especially frustrating because the first fire wasn’t taken as seriously as it could have been. Residents gave their opinions to city officials during an informal meeting in the front yards of that neighborhood.

Booker said the point was driven home for him when, during a tour of the neighborhood, he and city officials saw other structures that were deteriorating or were non-compliant with city ordinances. Booker said he also saw two homes where “clearly, children lived” in what could be an unsafe neighborhood.

Booker said research made the issue clearer but worse, noting 32 registered sex offenders in Lawton list themselves as homeless, adding the city currently “allows homeless individuals, including sex offenders, to occupy houses in neighborhoods where children play.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Booker said, adding that was his push to ask the council to adopt his Kid’s First initiative and direct the city manager to take specific actions, starting with a directive to ramp up the city’s deteriorating structure program.

Called D&D (dangerous and dilapidated), the program by the city’s neighborhood services division identifies structures that are unsafe for various years, then gives owners a set time to either bring the structures up to city code or demolish them — or the city will do it and bill them the cost. Public hearings allow owners to plead their cases before the council makes its decision. In 2020, the council decided to emphasize the process by dealing with 120 D&D structures a year.

Booker’s initiative would “throttle up” the program, bringing more structures to the council floor for consideration of placement on the demolition list. His goal is 40 properties a month (480 a year) until fewer than 40 D&D structures exist, Booker said. Although a list of properties already exists in some form, city staff will create a new master list of the most dangerous properties so the council can tackle those first, he said.

Identification of the worst of the properties will begin immediately, with the first batch of properties to be brought to the council floor in February, Booker said. In addition, discussion of unsafe issues will be made at 5 p.m. before each regular 6 p.m. council meeting, he said, adding that a cleanup plan for the city is to be to the council by the Feb. 11 regular meeting.

Booker’s ultimate goal is to bring all non-compliant structures into compliance with city code or demolish them, saying he set a time table of one year for the council to address 90 percent of the worst properties, then identify a “date certain” to reach a 99 percent goal.

Funding for the initiative already exists. The 2019 CIP included $3.75 million to address deteriorating structures, a fund expanded by $7 million by PROPEL 2040, the CIP Extension approved by city voters in August.

The goal is to address the issues that make neighborhoods unsafe, Booker and council members said.

“To not act would be a dereliction of duty,” Booker said.