Village code enforcement-
Part of the responsibility of your village is to help maintain property values through sound fiscal management and also to enact intelligent and useful codes. Once those various codes are on the books, making sure property owners adhere to them is obviously important.
From time to time, and lately it seems more frequent than ever, we get complaints from residents about various properties which are not in compliance for a variety of reasons. In order to help you maintain the value of your property, we will be increasing our enforcement efforts.
Violations run the gamut from unmowed lawns to unlicensed cars in driveways, yards full of junk, chicken coups where not allowed, and all kinds of other violations that result in unkempt or unsafe properties.
We know many people like living here partly because it's the Village of Country Living. We are not a north suburban city but rather a more semi-rural town, a combination of subdivisions and a lot of open space and farms. Therefore, in our efforts to keep the village beautiful, our code enforcement efforts must strike a fair balance between allowing residents the reasonable use of their property and the rights of others to have a clean, safe, and respectable neighborhood.
Heretofore, we've basically responded to complaints. With the increasing need to help protect your property values, we have engaged additional resources which will take a more proactive approach, in addition to responding to complaints received. In this case, proactive means we will be surveying our community looking for obvious code violations and when they are identified, the property owners will be notified and asked to bring their properties into compliance. As you might guess, there are procedures to follow and remedies for the village for continuing cases of non-compliance.
In our subdivisions that have homeowners' associations, the role of the association will not change- monitoring compliance with their rules will still be the primary responsibility of each association.
Our proactive survey of the village will start soon and we promise that it will be conducted on a fair and impartial basis with due consideration to the need for the balance as noted above. And remember: this is about helping protect property values along with an eye toward public safety, as well.
If you have any questions or comments, you can email them to me or call our village hall.
