Nuisance Tax in West Palm Beach

On Monday the West Palm Beach city commission unanimously voted to pass three chronic nuisance codes that will allow for police and code services to be billed to an owner's property tax bill. The new codes say that if police respond to three nuisance calls on a residential or commercial property within 30 days that the owner will be required to present a written remediation plan and fix the problems or else the cost of code enforcement will be assessed on the property tax bill. The point of the new codes is to discourage nuisance activity and to require property owners and not taxpayers to bear the cost of enforcement.

Obviously this will present a challenge for landlords who will now be financially culpable for the transgressions of their tenants that result in complaints to the police. But it will be good for neighborhoods to finally have a way to penalize residents who violate local codes and laws. And although financial projections were not given, it certainly provides another source of revenue for the city in a time of decreasing property tax revenues.