The Bayonne City Council is planning to introduce an ordinance to establish the Division of Code Enforcement within the Department of Municipal Services, a previously stated priority of new Mayor Sharon Ashe-Nadrowski.
By Dan Israel/Hudson County View
At Wednesday’s caucus meeting, Council President Melissa Godesky-Rodriguez had Business Administrator Andrew Casais explain the gist of the ordinance the council would likely introduce next week before calling a special meeting for second reading.
“It’s important to what we want to do going forward for the future of Bayonne. We’re going to hold a special meeting … days after our next meeting to move this along and make this a priority,” Godesky-Rodriguez explained.
After the council votes to introduce the ordinance at its regular meeting next Wednesday, the measure will be up for a public hearing and final vote at a special meeting on August 26th.
“This is establishing the Division of Code Enforcement within the Department of Municipal Services,” Casais said.
“This is the enforcement mechanism for property maintenance and a lot of the quality of life issues that the various municipal departments and the council have received over the last couple of weeks, couple of months, couple of years.”
According to Casais, the city hasn’t had effective property maintenance enforcement in “quite a long time,” so this would establish the framework under which the Division of Code Enforcement would operate.
“It would have leadership, there would be a clerical component which would be comprised of various code enforcement personnel, to be determined in terms of number,” he noted.
“What we’ve worked out administratively as a framework is the city would be split into zones where inspectors would be assigned principally to both, again, do that proactive enforcement and the reactive enforcement to resident complaints.”
Casais said that the number of employees and depth of the work will be determined by the budget, considering the year is already more than halfway over.
“That means we are halfway plus, in the best circumstances, through the budget,” he explained.
“So we will do the best we can to stand this up in 2026 and go into 2027 with much more depth and capacity. But this is a starting point to again begin property maintenance enforcement in the city.”
