New deputy village attorney is making an impact in P.C.

September 12, 2024 at 12:20 a.m.
Calli Jones, Port Chester’s first deputy village attorney, is making significant progress dealing with code enforcement and fire inspection cases.
Calli Jones, Port Chester’s first deputy village attorney, is making significant progress dealing with code enforcement and fire inspection cases. (Richard Abel/Westmore News)

By JANANNE ABEL | Comments: 0 | Leave a comment
Editor

Calli Jones, Port Chester’s first deputy village attorney, is taking her job seriously and getting results.

Among other legal functions, she is the village’s in-house code enforcement prosecutor. And her office is on the second floor at Village Hall in the Code Enforcement Department.

“It has been really great to have it here,” Jones said of her office location during a telephone call on Aug. 19. “The officers are able to come to me and ask me questions all the time about what I need to do for this case. It’s been very collaborative. They’ll come and ask if this is the right thing.”

Since Jones started on Apr. 22, she said she has put together 18 conditional discharges which means that “you work out an agreement with the defendant and attorneys and you give them a lot of time. I’ve created some paperwork on these different cases where I give them plenty of time.” For most of them she has given the offender until the end of February or March to remedy the situation.

“These are things like an illegal apartment was found or Code Enforcement went in and discovered there was work done without a permit,” said Jones.

She is proud of the fact that in early August she arranged a conditional discharge for the oldest case on the village’s docket from 2018.

“I don’t know why it was existing for so long,” she said. “They had their own attorney on it. The first court date I had with them, I had drafted the proposed paperwork. I said I’ll give them time. It wasn’t a confusing process.”

While the case isn’t resolved, “they’ve entered into a binding agreement where they have to fix everything by the end of March. They have to give me updates every 30 or 60 days. They have to send me paperwork showing they are moving toward compliance.”

“With that gone, most cases are from 2023-24 now,” Jones said proudly. “I was appalled there was something on the docket from 2018. I’m trying to keep things timely. I think that’s very important. The longer they drag on, it’s bad for everybody involved. What’s the point of continuing cases for infinity?”

Before this new deputy attorney initiative, the code enforcement prosecutor was appointed by the Board of Trustees. Before Jones, the board had appointed former Port Chester Justice Matt Troy to prosecute all cases on behalf of the village, including code enforcement.

Prior to that, the code enforcement portion was outsourced to a law firm. When Village Prosecutor James Tobin and his firm, Tobin & Bernardon, took over in January 2022, they had 150-200 open cases, Tobin reported at the Sept. 19, 2022 Board of Trustees meeting.

Troy was appointed because the board wasn’t satisfied with the progress Tobin and his firm were making.

However, Troy soon realized the main challenge to effectively prosecute code cases was time, Village Manager Stuart Rabin wrote in an email. Rabin agreed.

“The volume of cases and procedures we needed to address was too substantial for a part-time role,” said Rabin. “At a part-time pace, we would not be able to keep up with the demand.”

    Deputy Village Attorney Calli Jones sits in the second row during Wade Beltramo’s talk “Code Enforcement: The Foundation of Any Effort to Stem Blight and Decay” at the Port Chester Senior Community Center on Aug. 15 as the first offering in the Village Manager’s Speaker Series. Beltramo is general counsel for the not-for-profit New York Conference of Mayors.
 By Jananne Abel 
 
 

So Troy and Rabin spoke to the Board of Trustees about filling the deputy attorney position Rabin had proposed previously but which was never filled. The intent this time around was that it would be a full-time role focused on prosecuting code enforcement and fire inspection cases.

“With Judge Troy’s support, our pitch to the Board of Trustees was clear and succinct, highlighting where we had been falling short and how we could make a positive change for the community,” said Rabin.

“Ms. Jones, who had recently moved into the community, saw our posting for the role, interviewed excellently with significant experience and has been effective since day one,” the village manager added.

Calli Jones comes to Port Chester

Jones, 34, grew up in Tennessee. You can detect a hint of Southern drawl in her speech and Southern hospitality in her pleasant personality.

She graduated from Loyola University School of Law in Chicago in 2015. In law school she had clerkships with the Chicago prosecutor’s office.

After passing the bar in Illinois, she did a public interest fellowship with the non-profit Domestic Violence Legal Clinic in Chicago.

Then Jones returned to Tennessee and worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Memphis for three years before moving to Chattanooga and going into private defense for Liberty Mutual. She found her way to Queens because her brother moved to Forest Hills, and it was time for a change. She moved to Astoria and continued to work remotely for Liberty Mutual.

“I had practiced law long enough that I didn’t have to pass the bar in New York,” she was thrilled to learn. And she met her husband in Astoria. He does sales for GE.

“One of his regions was Westchester,” she said. “We were looking to settle down and get out of the City. He said there is a cute place we should look, and it’s called Port Chester. We came last August to look, and I ended up loving Port Chester.” So, they bought a house and moved into the village in November.

Jones was interested in getting back to her roots in the public interest and public policy sector. In March she saw the post for the deputy village attorney position and reached out. “I was really excited when I interviewed,” she said.

She was hired at an annual salary of $125,000.

Takeaways from talk

When Wade Beltramo, general counsel for the not-for-profit New York Conference of Mayors, came to Port Chester for the first offering in the Village Manager’s Speaker Series on Aug. 15, Village Manager Rabin shared the success of creating the deputy village attorney position to prosecute code enforcement cases. It was in line with the topic of Beltramo’s talk: “Code Enforcement: The Foundation of Any Effort to Stem Blight and Decay.”

“We are giving our [code enforcement] officers some hope that for the work they are doing, there is a resolution,” Rabin said during the talk, to which leaders from other municipalities as well as from Port Chester were invited. “It’s about compliance. It’s not a revenue generator. It’s a health and safety issue.”

“When they go out and find something wrong,” Rabin elaborated, “they are not going to have to wait three years. Now there are regular updates and visiting the properties. It has been wonderful for us. It is working.”

Jones sat up front at the presentation and listened intently.

“I thought it was really informative,” she said. “I ended up taking a lot of notes. He did a really good job covering a lot of things in a short time. I liked his emphasis on taking a step back and looking at procedures and processes and collaborating with different resources within the community and not that one thing is the option. Criminal court might not always be the answer.”

While she has not done this exact job before, Jones said she loves this part of the law. “It’s a neat area of law where you are able to use different courts and different rules and different codes.”

“When you go to justice court on Thursday, there is a lot of criminal procedure involved,” she added. “That is a lot of my background as an ADA. But with this job there is a lot of new considerations like housing which I find very interesting.”

Jones said she flagged Beltramo’s recommendation of creating a property maintenance task force. “That is something I would want to bring to the village manager and my boss (Village Attorney James Carpiniello) to get more input from the community.”

Overcrowding, poorly
maintained properties and more

While overcrowding was raised as the biggest issue municipalities are dealing with related to code enforcement, Jones said she’s been dealing with various types of cases including property maintenance and doing work without a permit. “It’s been a mixture of a lot of different things,” she said. “There may be a lot of overcrowding, but in court so far it is a mix of a lot of things.”

Talking about a July fire on Seymour Road that uncovered overcrowding, Jones said that case had not yet made it to court. “I believe they sent out notices of violation first and then eventually it would come to court if they aren’t able to get into compliance,” she explained.

Is it difficult to prove overcrowding?

“The speaker made some good points about the meters and really documenting with pictures,” said Jones. “If there was a fire and you were able to get consent to enter a home and you took pictures of all these bedrooms and walls put up, that would be beneficial to prove a case.”

To deal with property maintenance, there is a local property maintenance code that regulates the maximum height of grass, trimming of tree limbs and getting rid of weeds. There is also a state property maintenance code which includes language about the exterior of a building and about painting. It talks about no peeling or flaking paint, Jones  explained.

To deal with lack of property maintenance, “you might have to go to court and get an order,” said Jones. “Our property maintenance code has a section where you can bring a contractor in and put a lien on the property.”

Jones said her collaboration with the Code Enforcement Department “echoes what Wade [Beltramo] was saying about checking on processes and procedures.”

Does she think the landlord registry will be helpful?

“That was a law passed before I came on board,” said Jones. “It was adopted by the village board in June 2023. Letters went out at the beginning of this month (August). The board waived the fees through the end of the year.”

“A lot of jurisdictions around seem to have these,” she added. “The multi-family properties are covered under fire inspections. This covers two-family, non-owner-occupied dwellings.”

Jones feels it makes a difference that she lives in town. “I really do love Port Chester,” she said. “I hope to be here for a very long time. It’s my own community, so it adds a layer of extra meaning.”

If you have witnessed overcrowding, lack of property maintenance or work being done without a permit in Port Chester, Jones said you should feel free to contact her at [email protected]


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