City court summons property owner

By Journalism I

The owner of a derelict residential property on Park Avenue has been summoned to appear in City Court on May 21 under the direction of the city corporation counsel’s office.

The building at 681 Park Ave. has been vacant since March 1996 following a fire there. Owner Patrick Landers, a city firefighter, has registered the property on the city’s vacant building registry but the outside of the building is in disrepair and the building is unsafe, according to city records and neighbors.

681 Park Ave., Albany

In recent weeks some work has been completed on the former rental property, which has been vacant for 18 years.

The city has not yet filled a recent request by The Pine Hills blog for up-to-date records pertaining to the most recent results of an inspection at the property. A request was filed under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

City inspector Dave Aumand recommended two years ago that the building be demolished and previous records show that the property is unsafe. As recently as April 2013 the city ordered the owner to rectify a number of building code violations.

In the nearby town of Colonie, if the town determines a building is to be demolished, the owner may hire an engineer to try and prove that a building is safe, said Paul Shepard, a building inspector in Colonie.

“To bring a building up to code you need a building permit and a set of plans which is usually very expensive,” said Shepard.

In Albany, the city had ordered Landers to repair all missing siding, paint all doors and window coverings a complimentary color, repair exterior stairs, replace missing glass, fix the back porch and register the building. In addition, the roof needs to be reinforced and the awnings removed. Few of these deficiencies had been addressed by last week. Now, old, weathered plywood and new unpainted plywood cover  some windows and a front door frame. The old fake brick siding – ice and water shield – and old aluminum siding have been removed since a recent inspection.

Before the city’s building and codes department conducted property inspections the task fell to Albany firefighters. But, in 2011 an audit of the city’s code enforcement regulations by the city’s chief auditor Leif Engstrom, criticized the city for permitting firefighters to inspect other firefighter-owned properties. Three years ago, that audit stated that “of 55 rental properties that were listed on the city assessor’s website as having an active firefighter as the current or previous owner, 16 had inspections performed by a fire company while under firefighter ownership.” That city audit followed an audit 12 years earlier that determined city firefighters should not inspect other firefighter-owned properties in the city.

The house on Park Avenue is one of more than a dozen vacant properties in the Pine Hills neighborhood, out of some 800-plus properties city wide that are vacant or abandoned. When the vacant building registry was created in the city after a 1998 proposal to the city Common Council, the purpose of that proposal was to “determine the responsibilities of owners and speed the rehabilitation of these structures.”

In 2002, a class from the state University at Albany developed a registry that at the time identified more than 800 vacant buildings in the city.-30-
By: Paige DeSorbo, Ashley Girard, Courtney Guttenberg, Vanessa Langdon, Jessica LePore, Justin Porreca, Danielle Martinez, Joe Russell, Alexis Saccone, Sarah Bosworth, Ashley Sweet and Dominga Cooper-Gleason