Girardville blight committee walks west end, updates blight list
KAYLEE LINDENMUTH / SENTINEL PHOTO - Dan Heiser, Girardville councilman, takes a look at a garage's fallen wall as the blight committee walked the borough on July 19, 2018.
By Kaylee Lindenmuth
GIRARDVILLE – Thursday, the Girardville blight committee took a walk around the borough’s west end, updating its blight list and forwarding code issues to the borough’s code enforcer.
“When we first started, we made a list, and we ended up with, with a grant through the county, six or seven properties we got taken down,” said Dan Heiser, Girardville councilman.
The blight committee is comprised of borough council members and residents alike. The committee met at St. Joe’s Community Church and worked their way from there to the Butler Township line, winding the streets.
Along the way, committee members found properties with broken windows, both boarded up and not, visible structural issues, including one collapsed wall and another caving in.
According to Heiser, the issues would be forwarded to the borough’s code enforcement officer and would be dealt with from there.
Rob Krick, borough council president, noted that strategies were needed to tackle a multitude of properties in one project.
“We have to come up with strategies, like on Ogden Street where we have a group of blighted properties, we’ve got to be able to try to get ahold of them and own all of them, so that the demo project can make sense and we can take down about eight houses,” said Krick.
Heiser noted that residents are welcome to attend and share their ideas as well, and Krick added that the next meeting will be on the third Thursday of August at 6:00pm.
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