David Coates / The Detroit News City departments do not coordinate in removing blight from neighborhoods. A motorboat and stripped car remain abandoned on the flooded 5100 block of Beaufait, near Farnsworth, even after city agencies responded to clean up the area.

Poor coordination allows problems to fester

    On Beaufait near the Lutheran Cemetery on Detroit’s east side sits an illegal dump for trash and abandoned cars. Public Works is responsible for the trash, and the police for abandoned cars. But the two don’t coordinate cleanup efforts.

    Last January, Archer promised that all the illegal dumps around Detroit would be cleaned up by the end of October. Refuse collection crews last cleaned up the Beaufait block in March. The police hauled away six cars during the summer.

    When police left, there was a trash pile that has now grown into mounds of mattresses, rotting clothes, tires, a lounge chair, smashed furniture, shattered windows, a mangled foosball table, heaps of garbage, empty liquor bottles and a motor boat.

    Ulysses Burdell, the interim deputy director of Public Works, estimated eight to 10 truckloads of debris are sitting on Beaufait, but he doesn’t have any plans to clean up the illegal dump again. He said there aren’t enough occupied houses around for the area to be considered residential, although Helen Hillmon, 77, who lives just down the street, has complained about the dump repeatedly.

    “There are higher priorities out there,” Burdell said. “We’ll get to it when we can.”

    Similarly, the police, Public Works and the Planning and Development Department aren’t working together to clean up a tire-strewn lot at 9350 Harper on Detroit’s east side, which the city itself owns.

    Police won’t cite Planning and Development, the owner of the land as a result of a tax foreclosure, even though the department is in violation of city law.

    Public Works officials, aware that the lot is a dumping ground, won’t remove the tires because they don’t want to spend the money. The state paid the city to get tires off the lot in 1999.

    “We will get back there to clear out the tires at some point,” Burdell said. “I can’t tell you when.”

    Stuck with the mess on Harper is Thomas Blakney, who lives nearby on May.

    “What the (expletive) do I pay taxes for?” said Blakney, 59. “For this,” he said, gesturing to the tires and debris. “What good is it keeping my property up? Right now it looks like a jungle around here. ... When I retire next year, I’m selling the house and getting the hell out. ... I can’t take it no more.”

    Lack of coordination between departments also can cost lives. In April, Detroit Police Officer Neal Wells was shot to death outside a 12-unit apartment building on Cherrylawn on the west side during a drug raid. To police, the building was a known drug house, occupied by squatters. But to Building and Safety Engineering inspectors, the building was vacant, boarded up and in compliance with city property laws.

    Police failed to tell housing inspectors that the building was in fact occupied by squatters. Inspectors could have taken emergency legal action to have it demolished. There is still no policy requiring police and housing inspectors to share information.