Former owner of 16th Avenue ‘eyesore’ due in court next week
June 9, 2010 by star-news-group-belmar-headlines
Filed under Uncategorized
By Molly Mulshine
The unfinished house at 313 16th Ave. has been the subject of controversy among borough officials and residents for more than a year.
Photo by SUEANNE GOSS, STAR NEWS GROUP
At a Lake Como Borough Council meeting last week, council members and residents continued to discuss a structure at 313 16th Ave. which has been the subject of controversy for over a year — just a few weeks before the former owner of the property is due to answer for unpaid fines in municipal court.
The property at 313 16th Ave. was, until recently, owned by Dr. Gregory Skinner, a cosmetic dentist who says he lives in Atlantic City and has a practice in Manhattan.
Dr. Skinner, who did not attend last week’s meeting, said he began to renovate the house in 2008, in hopes of selling it.
“We tore the house down completely to the foundation and the first floor, and we elevated the house 10 inches so you could walk in the basement,” Dr. Skinner said.
“We added a second floor, a third floor and another roof,” Dr. Skinner said.
The renovation was halted, however, when Dr. Skinner realized that he was dealing with an “unscrupulous contractor,” he said.
“Everything he did on the house was wrong from a construction standpoint,” Dr. Skinner said. “The first floor header wasn’t put in properly, some of the floor joints and window openings weren’t cut off properly, the roof wasn’t installed properly.
“It was just a lot of construction issues that he wasn’t able to fix, so we fired him,” Dr. Skinner said.
At this point, in July 2008, “the real estate market and the economy took a tank,” said Dr. Skinner, who owns four other properties in Belmar and Wall.
“It was no longer economically feasible to complete the project,” he said
Thus, the structure has stood, unfinished, from the summer of 2008 until the present.
Lake Como residents and council members have, in the past, described the structure as an “eyesore.”
Residents such as John Riggs, who lives near the property, have spoken out about the structure’s state of disrepair.
“It has forced me to do things I don’t want to do,” Mr. Riggs said at last week’s council meeting. “It has forced me to rent [my house out]. I don’t want to rent, but I cannot sell my house until something happens [with Dr. Skinner’s property].”
“From my perspective,” Mr. Riggs said, “it has cost everyone in town.”
Dr. Skinner said he began to receive violation notices from the borough in 2009, but said he never received any written requests for anyone to “set foot” on his property.
Dr. Skinner questioned, if borough code enforcement officials never obtained his permission to inspect the property, how could they issue him warnings?
Borough officials maintain that the violations were readily apparent from the street, and no code enforcement officer had to step onto the property to see them.
Although officials have said the building is structurally unsound, all of the violations that have been issued to Dr. Skinner have been in reference to problems with the house’s exterior.
In addition to the legal issues surrounding the structure’s safety, the house’s mortgage was foreclosed upon in November, due to Dr. Skinner’s failure to make mortgage payments.
Official documents from Deutsche Bank state that Dr. Skinner’s house was officially foreclosed upon on Nov. 24, 2009, at 3:22 p.m.
Dr. Skinner maintains that he is unaware of any foreclosure on his property.
On May 29, 2009, before the foreclosure, the borough issued a Notice of Unsafe Structure to Dr. Skinner regarding unsecured windows and other openings, as well as a deficient front porch roof and supports.
This notice was followed by a Notice and Order of Penalty dated July 15, 2009, which enforced a reinspection of the site as of that date. This notice imposed a $2,000 fine with an additional $2,000 for each week that the site continued to be deemed unsafe.
Dr. Skinner wished to appeal these notices, and the court hearing for these appeals was initially scheduled for Oct. 6, 2009.
Dr. Skinner requested an adjournment of the hearing, so it was postponed until Jan. 21.
Dr. Skinner requested that the January hearing be postponed once again, this time due to his wife’s pregnancy.
Officials declined to postpone the hearing because of the previous adjournment.
A document from the Monmouth County Board of Appeals also cites the safety threats posed by the structure, and the fact that Dr. Skinner had learned of the notices well in advance of the appeals.
At the hearing in January, Lake Como code enforcer John Rowe “confirmed that the structure was in a severe state of disrepair and neglect,” court documents state.
Dr. Skinner maintains that “Mr. Rowe gave me the OK” in May 2009, and that his house was compliant with borough standards by June 1, 2009.
“That was never the case,” Mr. Rowe said Wednesday. “Our building subcode official, Chuck Gimbal, had given [Dr. Skinner] notice requiring that he have an engineer review the structural stability of the building and make a determination as to whether the building had to be shored up or taken down, and he has not complied with that requirement.
“That was probably six months ago,” Mr. Rowe added.
Mr. Rowe said, when he met with Dr. Skinner in September, Dr. Skinner “agreed that the building would come down in a month, October.”
However, Mr. Rowe received neither a “report saying it should stand [nor the name of a] demolition contractor.”
Court documents also state that Dr. Skinner’s “written submission set forth no viable defense … and merely reflects that some work had been completed [as of July 2009], but then vagrants had broken into the house.”
At the hearing, the Board of Appeals declared that “the subject conditions are unsafe and require prompt repair.”
The Board of Appeals recognized that Dr. Skinner was unable to attend the hearing, but also “determined that [Dr. Skinner] was previously permitted an adjournment based on his letter of October 6, 2009, and that it was required to now promptly act upon his Unsafe Structure Notice for obvious reasons.”
Now that the structure has been foreclosed upon, and Lake Como has updated its ordinances regarding the demolition of such structures, the borough is authorized to demolish the house.
The presence of an oil leak under the house, though, has prevented the structure’s demolition thus far.
Lake Como Borough Attorney William B. Gallagher Jr., said the leak was reported to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection [DEP] as long ago as 2008.
As for the person who found and reported the oil, “That was a disgruntled contractor,” Dr. Skinner said. “He was the one who reported it to the DEP.”
The leak is coming from an old oil tank, which is “fairly common,” said Mr. Gallagher.
The severity of the oil leak has not yet been determined, but if the subsoil is “of a thick consistency and [the oil is] not going to be going anywhere, DEP [usually] just says leave it alone,” Mr. Gallagher said.
“But if it’s near a water source, then it can be more of a problem,” Mr. Gallagher added. “Sometimes, they remove all of the soil that’s contaminated, which can cost an exorbitant amount of money.”
The borough and the DEP do not yet know if the oil is dangerous to the environment.
“It doesn’t appear to be [dangerous],” Mr. Gallagher said. “There’s been no proof of any vibration. One of the near neighbors thought he saw oil in his sump pump in the basement,” but Monmouth County Hazardous Material Contractors and Transporters [hazmat] investigated, and they found that this oil was “a very light kind of oil, maybe what gets used for a bicycle out of a spray can,” and not the kind of oil that would leak from an old tank.
Mr. Gallagher said the town will not be able to demolish the house until the DEP notifies the borough of the seriousness of the underground oil.
“We’ve been contacting the DEP, and we’re just waiting for them to get back to us,” Mr. Gallagher said. “We are attempting to see if they have any instructions or any guidelines for our engineers to guide us to the most appropriate way to remove the structure without disturbing the contamination of heating oil that appears to be underneath the foundation.”
At last week’s council meeting, both Mr. Gallagher and Mayor Mike Ryan expressed their concern about acting too quickly to demolish the property, as the town would be liable for any oil damage to come afterward.
Although Dr. Skinner no longer owns the property at 313 16th Ave., he still owes the borough of Lake Como thousands of dollars from the Notice and Order of Penalty issued to him July 15, 2009.
Dr. Skinner is scheduled to appear in municipal court again next Tuesday, June 15.
Dr. Skinner maintains that he was not notified of this court date, and that he does not intend to appear, although borough records show that a notification was sent and delivered to his most recent residence.
“I just think they don’t like landlords,” Dr. Skinner said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s harassment, in my opinion.”
Still, “I don’t remember Lake Como ever taking someone’s house down,” Mr. Gallagher said at the June 1 meeting. “Everyone else has complied and tried to make the town look as nice as they could.”
More Belmar news, plus full coverage of southern Monmouth and northern Ocean counties, can be found at starnewsgroup.com.
Related Posts:
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Delicious