NORWICH – Jason Lawrence has been working as the City of Norwich code enforcement officer since September of last year. During his time he has done a lot to clean up the city, but now that the new garbage ordinance has gone into effect, Lawrence is going to have a lot more work to do.

“The city is in rough shape,” Lawrence said. “We just want to make it a cleaner, safer place to live.”

That was the idea behind the revised garbage ordinance, which focuses mostly on multi-family dwellings. The city is currently working to create a registry with the names and phone numbers of the buildings’ landlords, many of whom are out of the area. According to Lawrence, this makes things much more difficult. Many of the out-of-area landlords are nearly impossible to contact, and do not seem to care about the garbage issue in the city, he said.

“We have talked and met with 12 or 13 landlords so far,” the code enforcement officer said. “They understand the problem, but they just blame their tenants.” Blame will not help in this situation, because beginning on Friday, fines will be given for violations of the garbage ordinance, and both the landlord and the tenants will feel the strain on their wallets. There is a minimum $25 fine for the first offense, and $50 for each subsequent offense.