Kane County targets 'junk' vehicles, incomplete construction
Kane County officials will target two of the most common eyesores in local neighborhoods by using license plates to crack down on so-called junk cars and putting new construction on a hard calendar for completion to avoid half-done projects.
The county board's Property Maintenance Task Force concluded its work Tuesday on rewriting nuisance laws to close some loopholes that have spawned a stack of complaints in recent years.
The first loophole regards the ability of county residents to stockpile rundown vehicles as long as the engines still start.
Officials said the wording of the current law has resulted in several locations where yards look more like an automobile graveyard. Task force members decided Tuesday the easiest method to crack down on those vehicles is to redefine an “operable vehicle” as one that not only starts and moves, but also one that has a current vehicle registration. Task force members said they believed the owners of the junk vehicles were more likely to store the vehicles out of sight or get rid of them than cough up the money to buy new license plate stickers.
“Technically, your car is not legally operable on the public streets if it's not legally registered,” task force Chairman Mike Donahue said. “This will also make enforcement less difficult as our code officers can easily observe the vehicle to see if it's registered.”
There will continue to be exemptions in the county code for vehicles on farmland.
The task force also rewrote county code to give builders a one-year timeline to complete at least the exterior work on new homes or other projects to keep them from becoming long-term eyesores. A slow economy in recent years left a number of building projects around the county in various states of incompletion. Builders have gotten away with incomplete swimming pools, garages with no doors and construction equipment sitting in front yards for months on end. Current county code allows for those eyesores as long as the project has a building permit. Such permits are fairly open-ended because the county staff wants to encourage completion of projects, not abandonment.
The proposed new laws would require the substantial portion of exterior work on all projects to be complete within one year of the start of construction. That still leaves builders the ability to extend their projects beyond one year as long as the outside basically no longer looks like a construction site.
The full county board must still vote on the proposed changes before they become the new laws.