By LYNETTE SOWELL
Cove Leader-Press
The City of Copperas Cove is adding some funds to the upcoming 2025-2026 fiscal year budget to address an issue within the city – vacant, dangerous buildings.
At a recent city council workshop, the council heard budget projections from the city’s budget director, Ariana Beckman.
Some of those included new funding requests from city departments.
City Manager Ryan Haverlah also pointed out one new request to be added to the Code Compliance budget – $10,000 to address dangerous buildings in the city.
“The last one is an item that we actually saw great benefit from this past year, when we had the devastation of the East Blancas house explosion,” Haverlah told the council.
“That property was left in a very dilapidated state, and the city took the effort to clean that property up, and it of course caused a huge deficit in the code compliance budget for remediation of those types of items.
“But from a community standpoint, it should create benefit. There are many other properties in town that could use that type of service, remediating those properties down to the ground, basically.”
Haverlah said that because the council has directed the city to move forward with “more impactful code enforcement activities”, this is one way to do that.
Mayor Dan Yancey asked how they arrived at the $10,000 figure to add to the budget.
Haverlah said that the demolition of the East Blancas property cost about $9,000.
“This allows us to start a program to where we could potentially knock at least one (building) down in the first year and hopefully grow that to more in future years.”
Haverlah added that the East Blancas house was demolished and remediated, and that the City filed liens against the property, and the City Secretary’s office collected on those liens.
“We actually made that money back to restore that funding, in essence,” Haverlah said.
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