In response to The MV Times article last week on overcrowding in Island homes, The Machado property on 19th Street North in Edgartown has been known to be overcrowded by town officials for many, many years.
The late, great Ron Rappaport fired off a letter to this serial offender to correct his many infractions years ago. While another terrific past board of health official, Matt Poole, along with two other Island board of health officials from other towns, along with the Edgartown Police Department and Dukes County Sheriff’s Office inspected the house five-plus years ago, and found 30 to 35 people living in close quarters, with little to no egress.
In Poole’s opinion, he had never seen anything close to this level of severe violations in his long career. The other health officials reached the same obvious conclusion.
I think the larger editorial story here is Edgartown, and like so many towns like that are faced with a housing shortage, turning a blind eye to overcrowding runs the risk of significant liability to the town and taxpayers.
The big open question in my mind is — Do town insurance policies insulate a town against future liability in such cases, where they have prior knowledge or a duty to act against multiple offenders not in compliance, and fail to take the appropriate measures, with a tragic outcome? What is a town’s liability for failure to enforce?
I think it is a growing risk, and a plaintiff’s dream lawsuit for a grieving widow to prove prior knowledge. Many people — elected officials, health, police, fire, and the building departments, and I’ve spoken with all of them — now know full well, or have known for many years, of numerous overcrowded houses, and are choosing to slow-walk these offenders in the hope of the problem going away.
We all collectively spill gallons of ink on the plight of the affordable housing crisis, yet we spend virtually no time discussing the liability issues of what’s happening out there with the existing housing stock in an overcrowded state, as described above.
By every indication, it is not going away, and we need to take a long, hard look at the lack of enforcement and the lack of field officers inspecting these properties, and forcing these egregious, serial offenders into criminal court to face the judicial system for reckless endangerment and criminal negligence toward the health and welfare of their occupants. This is what it appears to have come to with the town having limited enforcement action and laughable fines for noncompliance.
There isn’t a person among us with good common sense that wouldn’t think for a minute to do this sort of thing in a residential neighborhood, yet some people for whatever reason choose to ignore sound fire code, etc.
On 19th Street North, it literally became propane tanks ready to explode, with 13 people in the basement, with no egress, that forced the town to finally stop its procedural dawdlings.
The story is, Everybody knew it, knows it, and only acted after years of complaints, site visits, fines, and countless hours of town involvement by multiple departments. Some people within town government have even told me that it is not politically viable to address these issues. They feel that their political careers would have a “short shelf life.” I believe it speaks to how profoundly embedded the problem is, and, I believe, how wrong-footed the approach has become.
In my opinion, that’s the big untold story, if someone would take the time to investigate it and write about it.
What’s the risk? Nobody seems to know, or seemingly care … until? At which point, you’d probably then see several people opt for early retirement.
It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have to do all these gymnastics to do the right moral and ethical thing, under Peter Bettencourt and Ted Morgan’s guidance …. Political correctness be damned. Now what passes as good stewardship only acts when they seemingly have adequate political cover to do so. Local government can and should perform a lot better than this.
Brendan Langley is a resident of Edgartown and only Edgartown.