Two incidents of bricks or stucco falling off of buildings in downtown Atlantic, prompted the city Administrator to bring the issue of safety to the City Council, Wednesday evening. During a recent incident, a businesswoman was struck by stucco debris from a building. Last December, a large portion of a brick wall on the northeast part of a building in the 500 block of Chestnut Street, collapsed onto the sidewalk below, resulting in a brief evacuation of residents as a safety precaution, but there were no injuries.

City Administrator John Lund requested a meeting of the Community Protection Committee to discuss the issues and determine who is responsible for the safety of taller buildings in the downtown area. Lund said he spoke with SWIPCO Executive John McCurdy and Code Enforcement Officer Kris Erickson. Both agreed the issue is something the CPC should discuss. Councilman Gerald Brink asked Lund, “So what’s the public think…how should city government be involved in that?” Lund said “That’s a question for you to ask, to be honest.”

He said if the people blame the property owner and not the city, then we probably shouldn’t be involved. But usually when bad things happen, he says, people turn to government and ask “Why didn’t you prevent this from happening.” Lund said “Ideally, we just have a couple of problems that would be cheap fixes. We work with the cooperative property owner and we don’t really need to get more involved in that, but we really don’t know…we need someone to look at these buildings [that may have] serious structural problems that cost a lot of money.” Then it would be up to the Council to determine where to draw the line on the City’s involvement.”

Councilperson Kathy Somers said the outside of the City’s Minimum Maintenance Code (MMC), she doesn’t know what the City’s role would be.

Code Enforcement Officer Kris Erickson said she and Lund have spoken with SWIPCO’s John McCurdy and gotten his opinion on the matter,

She said because of the MMC, currently the City’s only way to deal with the potentially dangerous facades, is to do issue a municipal infraction and take them to court.