Greensburg plans inventory of blighted city properties
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There are more than 6,000 parcels of land in the City of Greensburg, and Westmoreland County employees soon will examine all of them to figure out which are blighted.
The city received a $10,000 grant from the Realtors Association of Westmoreland, Indiana and Mon Valley to partner with the county to create a comprehensive blight inventory.
Greensburg has made several previous attempts to catalog vacant or dilapidated properties, marking some of the worst of them with red “X” signs in 2017.
These earlier efforts were “a good starting point,” but did not fully capture the problem, said city Planning Director Jeff Raykes.
“We were still missing stuff on that list. I knew just from knowing the city that there were things that were new and different in terms of either blighted structures, or vacant properties where there was no structure at all.”
Staff from the county’s Technical Resources and Municipal Services will go street by street, rating each property’s condition as “good,” “fair” or “poor,” said Daniel Carpenter, assistant director of Westmoreland County’s Department of Planning and Development. They will use many indicators to determine a property’s level of blight, such as cracking bricks, rotting wood and windows that are boarded up or missing, Carpenter said.
“Staff members will be going out on foot and kind of canvassing the city to find these blighted properties,” Carpenter said.
This data will be compiled into an electronic map of the city.
Work is expected to start this month and wrap up early next year.
The county planning department recently completed a similar blight inventory in Monessen.
The city will create a blight task force made up of residents and other stakeholders to discuss solutions to the city’s blight problem, according to Raykes.
Greensburg officials will begin work on a new comprehensive plan for the city next year. They can use data from the blight inventory to figure out a strategy for future development, Raykes said.
“Once we get the inventory, let’s the get the consultant that we hire for the comprehensive plan to develop a remediation strategy.”
Mayor Robert Bell said the study will allow the city to make informed decisions for its future.
“It is the intention of the city to not only understand the amount of blight that resides within our community, but to come up with a tangible solution to economically eliminate it in our city,” Bell said in a statement.