Safer, cleaner neighborhoods will mean a new look for city departments

(Editor’s Note: Today is part two of stories explaining the beginning of the City of Lawton’s Kids First initiative.)

Emphasizing the looks of the community is going to give the City of Lawton’s departments a new look, as efforts for the Kids First initiative continue.

City Manager John Ratliff said one of the things that City Council members will be looking at in this year’s budget review will be a realignment of city departments; in particular, making what is now the Community Services Department an arm of the Parks and Recreation Department. That merger would take place July 1, with the start of the 2025-2026 fiscal year, Ratliff said, of actions now under way to create the budget for that fiscal year.

One of the primary goals, he said, is providing more code enforcement for the city, something council members and Mayor Stan Booker have said they want to see.

The plan is to reassign Community Services as an arm of Parks and Recreation, with who is now Community Services director becoming a deputy director under Parks and Recreation.

Neighborhood services, now a division under Community Services, is the division tasked with enforcement of city codes on things such as nuisance and dilapidated properties. Ratliff said the problem is, what exists now is an arbitrary enforcement of city code, because of a lack of personnel. Reorganizing the division under Parks and Recreation (already responsible for things such as maintaining city parks and mowing rights of way), would allow the city to add additional code enforcement officers, to align to each council ward.

The areas now under the most scrutiny are not aligned with wards, Ratliff said.

“That (non-alignment) doesn’t make sense, given the problems we are having,” he said.

Booker said city administrators also are looking at changing the name of neighborhood services because its name doesn’t really convey its goal. It’s something Lawton’s peer cities already have done, Booker said, adding the name would become the Safe and Clean Neighborhood Services Division.

Full execution of the merger plan would mean Community Services would become home to 18 code enforcement officers, enough to assign specific officers to each of the city’s eight wards. It’s all part of what Booker has dubbed “Throttle Up,” an initiative to get things done, and Booker said he already has directed the city manager to “remove all obstacles to success.”

The plan also will take a new approach to non-compliant properties, meaning those that don’t meet city codes.

The proposal is to identify all non-compliant properties by a set deadline, with specific steps identified to bring them into compliance by a certain date. That will be accompanied by a public education campaign conducted prior to enforcement beginning, Ratliff said. That enforcement has a one-year timeline, with 99 percent of identified properties to be in compliance by a not-yet-set date.

Ratliff said he also wants to relaunch the redevelopment authority, an entity that will address the question of what happens after someone tears down a deteriorating structure. Now, the process typically leaves a vacant lot that has to be maintained — and city officials say they often aren’t.

The re-established redevelopment authority will be tasked with offering incentives to developers to restore structures to vacant lots. There is funding in the Capital Improvements Program Extension for just such a purpose, $25 million for a redevelopment revolving loan fund that can be used an incentives for developers to “fill in” neighborhoods with vacant lots or deteriorating structures to restore property values.