In the past, Squalor has not been aggressive. They set no deadlines on settlement negotiations, which thus tended to go on forever. Hicks now promises to get aggressive. The major impression I brought home is that the pusillanimity of the code enforcement people is a general phenomenon. I heard story after story of zoning, code, and environmental cases that had been ignored, handed off, dropped.
Health refuses cooperate, period.
The trouble with more aggressive Squalor activity is that it will validate the bureaucrats' inclination to hand off their tough problems to Squalor, whether or not Squalor is the right tool for the problem. Squalor alone often will not be the right tool. If you want to dig through pavement, you need one. The lesson I learned is that the City will have to centralize these cases if it ever is to get serious results. There will have to be a central person, with the ability to reach into his administrative toolbox and select the tool that fits the problem.