The wide alley that cuts between the backs of apartment blocks facing Dundalk's Lange Street and neatly kept rowhouses facing Berkshire Road constitutes, as Baltimore County's chief code enforcement officer calls it, "a tale of two cities."
One side, for the most part, is littered with broken fences, unkempt yards and trash cans without lids, and with holes made by rats that gnawed through the plastic.
The other side, for the most part, has trimmed yards, newly paved parking pads and trash cans, anchored to fence posts, with lids that lock.
Of the 32 duplex-like buildings that face Lange, 23 are rentals. All of the rowhouses facing Berkshire are owner-occupied. Residents who have long made this Berkshire development overlooking Eastpoint Mall home have complained about the troubling nature of Lange Street. It cuts through the middle of their neighborhood like a worm eating through a perfectly good apple.
Many thought county officials had heard their cries for help 10 years ago, after Joseph Palcyznski went on a murderous rampage and held three hostages for 97 hours in a Lange Street apartment. The siege thrust this overlooked community, built in the 1950s for Bethlehem Steel workers, into headlines.
When the siege ended, leaders promised to pick up the trash, arrest the drug dealers, improve the homes and clean up the streets. A decade later, many residents are now saying the promises were hollow, that their complaints had fallen on deaf ears, that the litter, the rats and the drugs are worse now than in 2000.
Mike Mohler, the chief code enforcement officer, took umbrage after reading those statements in a Sunday article in The Baltimore Sun. On Wednesday, he and Jerry Chen, one of his most experienced inspectors, returned to Lange Street to tell their side and to assure skeptical residents that their calls weren't falling into a bureaucratic black hole.
Mohler has assigned seven inspectors "full time, every single day" to two ZIP codes in Eastern Baltimore County. He has an emergency "sweep team" of two more who spend most of their workweek in Dundalk, Essex and Middle River. When both forces combine, that's 40 percent of all Baltimore County code inspectors working one sliver of the sprawling jurisdiction. Only one inspector works the northern part of the county, from Towson to the Pennsylvania line.
"It's not like we've tuned out and turned a blind eye," Mohler said as he walked with Chen through the alley between Lange and Berkshire. "We come where the problems are, and the problems are here."
To emphasize his point, Mohler spread a large map over the hood of his county car. Since January 2008, his officers have investigated 15,128 complaints in the 21224 and 21222 eastern Baltimore County ZIP codes. Each complaint requires an inspector to visit a location up to four times, and can lead to hearings.
The numbers are startling: 2,419 complaints of animal feces; 1,084 for cars without license plates; 4,354 for tall grass and weeds; 6,083 for junk and debris; and 4,655 for trash cans without lids. Since 2004, inspectors have handed out 168 citations on Lange Street alone, which is just two blocks long.
In a one-day crackdown March 10 in the nearby Colgate neighborhood, inspectors wrote 308 tickets for lidless trash cans. Mohler said $25 fines weren't getting anyone's attention, so he upped the first offense to $150. Even with that, Mohler said, "We haven't hit the threshold" to persuade people to stop. Fines can go as high as $500.
Mohler has been doing this job for slightly more than two years, yet residents have been complaining for the past decade. He said he would consider it a failure if the area doesn't improve in the next year, and his map shows the daunting challenge ahead. Dots showing complaints cover the rowhouse communities such as Berkshire, Colgate and West Inverness like a cancer. There are hardly any in adjacent Northshire, a more upscale development of single-family homes.
In Berkshire, Chen spent about an hour Wednesday walking the alley between Berkshire Road and Lange Street, writing citations and snapping photos. Lidless trash cans attracted his attention, but so did cans with mismatched and ill-fitting lids. One backyard had eight empty cans; the one next door had five. Buzzing flies were a good indicator of leftover trash.
Problems weren't confined to Lange Street. The backyards of adjacent rowhouses on Berkshire had a maze of rat holes. One homeowner put wooden 2-by-4s over them in a lame attempt to cover them; the other stuffed empty beer cans into the openings. Neither, Chen said, would resolve the problem, and he wrote up notices ordering that corrective action be taken.
Chen and Mohler want it known that they are trying to get people's attention. The rats, the trash and the dog feces have not seemed to prompt the action they should. Maybe it does take a $500 fine for not having a trash can lid.
"We are trying to change people's behavior," Mohler said.