New Amarillo department to ensure city is held to a high standard

KFDA News Channel 10
By Sydnee Batzlaff
Published: Feb. 22, 2023 at 4:33 PM CST

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - The City of Amarillo will soon have additional staff for code enforcement, hoping to improve efficiency.

The City Manager’s Office has recently approved a re-organization of the current Fire Marshal’s Office with staff and responsibilities found within Building Safety and other departments to create a new department.

The new department will be named the City Marshal’s Office.

It will have a broader scope on code compliance in the city, along with other areas such as, parking enforcement.

“Just bringing that under one umbrella for better efficiency, having more staff responsible for code compliance, since we are a very large city, 105 square miles, we only had seven staff members responsible for code compliance citywide, so this allows us to basically double our staff that has the ability and focus on those areas,” said Andrew Freeman, assistant city manager, City of Amarillo.

The current Fire Marshal’s Office has seven employees in the field, the new office will have 15, along with the City Marshal and Assistant City Marshal.

The City says initial responsibilities will include:

• City wide inspections and follow-up of violations related to overgrown vegetation, junk and debris, junk vehicles, substandard/dangerous structures, littering/dumping investigations, and zoning violations.
• Oversight of the dangerous structure process, which coordinates with property owners to mitigate hazardous structures, which may ultimately lead to the demolition of a structure after other compliance measures fail.
• Oversight or coordination with the following city boards: Zoning Board of Adjustment, Construction Advisory and Appeals Commission, Condemnation Appeals Commission.
• Fire investigations; arson investigations; fire prevention plan review, inspection, and testing services; fire sprinklers and alarms.
• Parking enforcement downtown, parking and junk vehicle enforcement city-wide, taxi/limo inspection/permitting and animal drawn vehicle permitting.

Freeman says one of the benefits with creating this new department is putting the city in better alignment with other cities for the number of code enforcement related inspectors based on population size:

Freeman says the current office is more complaint-based, but hopes with additional staff it will change.

“This way we can hopefully be out and about working with community more to try and solve some of these before they become a challenge,” said Freeman.

He also adds they are not looking to write more tickets or citations.

“We really want to meet with people on the front end to share that there is an issue and hope to come to a way to address it before it becomes a bigger issue that’s harder to tackle,” said Freeman.

He hopes for more communication, efficiency and customer service.

“We’re also looking at adding software in the future to help track these cases, as well as our upcoming 311 system where our citizens will be able to take a photo of an issue and it gets submitted through the software and goes directly to the City Marshal’s Office and they’ll be able to respond that way, citizens will be able to track the case through the system and just know on the front end where everything’s going and make sure that it gets addressed,” said Freeman.

Overall, he says this is about city pride and expectations, making sure Amarillo is held to the highest standard.

For the new office, Freeman says it will take some transition, but should roll out in about a month with the new branding.

Staff for the new City Marshal’s Office uses existing staff and positions and has no impact on the fiscal year 2022-2023 budget.