Jersey City’s Quality of Life Task Force Introduces New Office, Promotes Resident Response Center in 2021
JERSEY CITY, NJ Feb 2 2021– With Jersey City’s Quality of Life (QOL) Task Force entering its second full year, local government officials introduced a series of modifications in hopes of improving community engagement and code enforcement.
Earlier this month, the task force, led by Municipal Prosecutor Jake Hudnut, became a division of the city’s Department of Public Safety and established an Office of Code Compliance to address municipal code infractions. According to Hudnut, the division now supervises the Resident Response Center, a means of reporting quality of life violations without contacting the police that was formerly managed by the mayor’s office.
“There are components of quality of life enforcement and disorder enforcement that are not best suited for law enforcement,” Hudnut said. “And quite often, law enforcement responding to those issues and not having the resources to handle them is a drain…when they could be responding to more pressing calls for service.”
Hudnut emphasized that the police officers on the team are essential to enforcing code and building relationships with residents. By understanding the needs of each neighborhood, Hudnut described that law enforcement personnel can more effectively solve community problems without relying as heavily on reactive policing.
Fire, housing code, zoning, construction code, commerce, and sanitation inspectors on the task force decrease the city’s reliance on armed officers handling quality of life complaints. The inspectors visit the site of an alleged code breach together, write summonses collectively, and consolidate all the offenses for the municipal prosecutor’s office to present in court.
The new Office of Code Compliance folded housing code, commerce, and sanitation inspections under one roof, while the other representatives oversee state administrative code matters.
“The most common offenders are absentee landlords, local polluters, blighted property owners, negligent businesses, and other public nuisances,” Mayor Steven Fulop said in an email through his press secretary. “The QOL team has been highly successful in getting results for neighbors and residents affected by these issues, and also in prosecuting violators when necessary.”
The inspectors responded to more than 350 quality of life grievances in 2020 and conducted over 2,500 reviews targeting regulations and price gouging related to the COVID-19 outbreak. Hudnut envisioned running an information campaign this year to increase awareness for the Resident Response Center and the services it offers. Instead of dialing 911 to document an infraction, anyone can request the task force’s assistance by calling the center, visiting its website, or using the Jersey City Connect application.
“We aim to further increase the ease with which the public can report quality of life concerns, and will continue expanding community outreach efforts,” Fulop said.
The task force’s domain also includes identifying and serving bench warrants to the individuals behind limited liability companies (LLCs) accused of offenses and relocating tenants whose landlords create unsafe living conditions. Hudnut noted that a recent ordinance passed by the city allows him to bill the landlords for those relocation costs.
“There’s always sort of a flavor of companies and LLCs or landlords that don’t necessarily live in the city limits but taking advantage of people that do in one way or the other,” Hudnut said.
Although former Mayor Bret Schundler technically founded the task force, Fulop and Hudnut launched an upgraded version in April 2019 to organize all the government agencies with the power to issue summonses and place the municipal prosecutor in charge of the effort. Fulop explained that several offices were previously responsible for penalizing quality of life abuses, an inefficient process that enabled repeat offenders.
But by creating a code enforcement body containing inspectors, the municipal prosecutor, and the mayor, Hudnut can combine all the citations of a given violator, present the complete package before a judge, and provide stronger arguments for his proposed resolutions.
“I think the reality is that the work of the task force, which primarily solves problems for underserved communities that are taken advantage of—such as tenants that may not feel on the same footing as their landlords—those are the people that the criminal justice system needs to better serve,” Hudnut said. “And so, the task force’s work, its quality of life enforcement, its disorder enforcement, is a means of this system standing up for people affirmatively.”
