Germantown neighbors want blight court to force repairs to 10-year eyesore house

WHEN MAYOR NUTTER recently announced his aggressive push to prosecute deadbeats whose blighted vacant properties ruin residential blocks, Julie Baranauskas and her long-suffering neighbors were startled to hear that Municipal Judge Bradley K. Moss is presiding over the city's new blight court.

"That's the same judge who has had the city's case against Tony Byrne since March," Baranauskas told the Daily News, talking about the owner of the severely blighted, 6,251-square-foot, 19th-century stone house next to hers that has plagued the jewel-like 5300 block of Knox Street in Germantown for 10 years.

"The neighbors have told Judge Moss how that house has been ruining our block and our property values," Baranauskas said. "We've shown him photos of the extreme blight there. We keep going to hearings. But nothing's changed.

"And this is the judge who's supposed to force owners like Byrne to fix up their properties or sell them? I'll believe it when I see it."

Meanwhile, what Baranauskas has seen every day for the past decade is Byrne's deserted, 11-bedroom mini-mansion with its broken and missing windows, piles of stone and wood rubble where the porch used to be, a huge cemented bay window, and the haunted look of death by decay.

Byrne's house - which dominates the corner of Knox and Coulter streets, and casts a pall over Germantown's gracious Penn-Knox neighborhood - should be the poster child for the tough new Department of Licenses & Inspections anti-blight program, which hauls absentee owners like Byrne before Judge Moss, who can fine them $300 per day for each window and each door that is not up to code.

In Byrne's case, that fine would be thousands per day.

NEW MUSCLE

L&I has targeted 23,058 blighted properties and, thanks to a recent state law, can now go after the absentee owners' personal assets to pay the staggering fines for noncompliance - or force the properties into sheriff's sale.

L&I's new muscle is supposed to wipe away years of deadbeat vacant property owners playing the court system for a fool while their blighted houses continue to bring down otherwise-fine residential city blocks that are at least 80 percent occupied.

But will it?

That depends on the judge. Although Moss has imposed more than $100,000 in fines on absentee owners of blighted properties during the court's first three months, he has used the carrot, not the stick, so far with Byrne.