Del Norte County Grand Jury
2025-2026
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Findings & Recommendations
5 findings
F1:
The Del Norte County Civil Grand Jury finds that:
A lack of funding and adequate enforcement resources and procedures has led to unsanitary and unsafe conditions throughout the county.
F2:
The Del Norte County Civil Grand Jury finds that:
Code Enforcement violations left unresolved have led to citizen complaints and concerns regarding safety, property values, and environmental hazards.
F3:
The Del Norte County Civil Grand Jury finds that:
Insufficient code enforcement staffing and procedures have resulted in an increasing number of open cases throughout the year.
F4:
The Del Norte County Civil Grand Jury finds that:
The requirement for code enforcement officers to have a complaint prior to processing a code violation has hindered the ability of code enforcement officers to proactively investigate nuisance properties.
F5:
The Del Norte County Civil Grand Jury finds that:
Lack of authority and resources to provide code enforcement has resulted in increased costs to county taxpayers due to a multitude of incidents which require sheriff and police department resources to respond to unmanaged properties and the properties surrounding them.
Additional Recommendations
6
Not linked to specific findings.
R1:
The County Board of Supervisors approve the recruitment and the hiring of at least one more full time code enforcement officer by December 30, 2026.
R2:
The County Board of Supervisors approve the recruiting and hiring of a part-time grant writer to increase the available resources within the code enforcement budget by December 30, 2026.
R3:
The County Board of Supervisors recommend and approve an increase in fines for repeat code enforcement violations to hold property owners responsible for said code violations by June 30, 2027.
R4:
The County Board of Supervisors approve and direct the appropriate county officials to create a mechanism by which they can hold property owners accountable for repeat code enforcement offenses which are depleting county resources by December 30, 2027.
R5:
The County Board of Supervisors direct the Community Development Department Director to create and implement a procedure to proactively initiate investigations and abatements into violating properties without a citizen complaint by December 30, 2027.
R6:
The County Board of Supervisors approve the creation and implementation of a procedure to levy a fine to recover costs for abandoned vehicles by December 30, 2026 and have the procedure implemented by March 30, 2027.
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.