FeedsCourt ruling upholds demolition order
A Wayne County Circuit Court judge ruled recently that officials in the City of Wayne dotted all their ‘i’s and crossed all their ‘t’s’ when they made their case against the old Jamison Block building.
The boarded up structure owned by Grizel Butler and her husband, Floyd Andrews, will be torn down as soon as next month, barring an appeal to or action from the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The Wayne County ruling came down on June 21, according to City Engineer Ramzi El-Gharib. The property owners have 28 days from then to file an appeal to the higher court, which would expire on July 28.
“If no appeals have been filed by then, we’ll start the demolition process,” said Peter McInerney, community development director for the City of Wayne.
That does not mean, though, that the bulldozers will be rolling the next day, El-Gharib said.
First the city has to determine if and what kind of asbestos is within the structure in order to properly abate it to eliminate any safety concerns.
“When we have that answer, then we can notify our contractors,” he said.
The city also has to work with all the utility companies to ensure there is no power in the building nor water service hooked up there. After those issues are solved, the actual demolition shouldn’t take more than four or five days, he said. He guessed, though, that if no appeal were filed and everything else happened relatively smoothly, that actual demolition wouldn’t start until some time next month.
“(Next week) we’ll start the process,” he said. “We’re going to move.”
The building, on Michigan Avenue between Wayne Road and Elizabeth Street, has been vacant for more than two decades. Now covered with peeling blue-painted plywood, the once-prominent structure has been unsightly for several years, according to city officials.
The property was the first commercial facility to be dealt with under the Dangerous and Blighted Building Ordinance, which gives city officials the ability to site structures that have been vacant and not marketed for more than six months. The goal of the ordinance, according to McInerney, is to spur property owners to fix up their land and facilities, but it also gives the city the authority to order the demolition of the building if all those efforts fail. Property owners have the right to take on that task themselves, otherwise the city will use its contractors to do it and then add the expense onto the tax rolls.
El-Gharib said this was a textbook case of the success of the ordinance and the way the city tackled it.
“We went step by step,” he said. “We followed the due process completely. We have them all kinds of opportunities. This was a good test of the ordinance.”
