Daytona Beach, FL - A new program is designed to clean up Daytona Beach one neighborhood at a time.
Code Walks - a public effort organized by the Daytona Beach Police Department - will hold its third event on Wednesday (November 7th) at 10 a.m. from the old Halifax Lanes location at 660 Mason Avenue.
Residents are invited to join DBPD - which took over the city's Code Enforcement Department several months ago - on a walk through the neighborhood, documenting any code violations they see and talking to the residents and homeowners about the best way to get those violations dealt with.
DBPD Captain Scott Lee says the long-term goal is to make the city look better and educate the public on how code enforcement actually works.
"Folks in the community really don't understand what code [enforcement workers] does on a daily basis," Lee added. "We don't do a good job of educating the public on what they're doing and they don't really get a lot of credit for the things that they do."
Lee tells us "Code Walks" will focus on areas where code enforcement officers are flooded with complaints, freeing them up to be more proactive with the complaints they're already working on.
"Sometimes, there [are] areas of the city that need a little more help but they might be assigned to one code officer," Lee noted. "The code officer can't cover all the complaints that are coming in plus be proactive in those areas."
The last time DBPD did a Code Walk was October 24th around Bellevue Avenue and Beach Street, where 104 inspections were completed and 32 cases were opened.
The first was in the Cedar Highlands Subdivision on October 17th, where 121 inspections were completed and 72 violations were observed.
Information from these walks is also passed on to Daytona Beach's Public Works Department when it's something they can address.
In conjunction with Code Walks, DBPD is now holding monthly CodeStat meetings, which are designed to give the latest on code enforcement violations and how they're being addressed to anyone who attends.
"It's very similar to CompStat, but it's just code-related," Lee noted. "In CompStat, we talk about crime. In CodeStat, we just talk about code related issues."
The next CodeStat meeting is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday at DBPD headquarters on 129 Valor Boulevard, 90 minutes before the Code Walk.
