Charlottetown aims to clean things up with updated unsightly premises bylaw

Charlottetown's city council is hoping to speed things up when it comes to cleaning up unsightly properties.

Council unanimously approved amendments to the city's Dangerous, Hazardous and Unsightly Premises Bylaw during a regular meeting on Tuesday night. The update allows the city's bylaw officer to do minor property cleanups without having to get approval from city council.

"Things like your grass or garbage on your property," says Julie McCabe, chair of Charlottetown's police and protective services committee.

"The process was always quite lengthy by the time he would get that through to committee, on to council for approval for him to go in and actually do his job."

Under the previous rules, it took about six weeks for the city's bylaw officer to be able to get approval from city council before he could do things such as asking homeowners to cut their grass, which McCabe said was an unnecessarily long delay.

"There still has to be notices," she said.

"He has his own process that he will still have to follow… he will work with homeowners to, you know, try to make sure that they have the opportunity to do what needs to be done to meet the bylaw."

Council will still vote on drastic action, such as demolition, if a property is deemed unsafe and unsightly, McCabe said.

"There's certain things that kind of fall under the national fire code. There's things that fall under the unsightly bylaw.

"And it was just to be clear, that this is for the smaller things that we amended tonight, garbage, grass, different things that cause your property to be unsightly, but it's not for your bigger projects. Absolutely not. Those are things that will still have to get through council," she said.

Council has talked about wanting to speed up the process when it comes to unsightly properties for the six years McCabe has been on council, she said.

Charlottetown has dealt with several properties the city deemed unsightly over the last few years. In late 2023, city officials were in a dispute with a homeowner over the length of their grass. That led to the city officials cutting the grass and giving the property owner the bill.

In January, city council voted unanimously to demolish a vacant house in the city if the property owner doesn't clean it up in the next year and half.