During municipal election season in 2020, several members of the Phil Campbell City Council made promises to clean up the city if they were voted into office. 

Six months after taking office, council members are taking steps that direction after the issue of several city ordinances being violated came up at the most recent council meeting.

“It is time to see things start cleaning up,” said City Councilman Philip King. “It’s past time.”

Discussion arose at the meeting about several businesses and individual properties in violation of city ordinances.

Although the council agreed on enforcing city ordinances, there were questions as to how to begin the process and how to do things fairly.

“We are not going to be able to just pick and choose,” said City Councilwoman Lynn Landers. “If we start enforcing ordinances, we have to enforce them for everybody.”

City Clerk Virginia Burks said the city has the files of all letters sent out about ordinance violations, which the city can use to see which citizens have already been notified of violations.

“We can just use that form and go from there,” Burks said.

Council members debated who would be tasked with enforcing violation resolutions and agreed several officials need to be in on efforts to clean up the city.

A decision was made to have a meeting among the city council, zoning board, a representative from NACOLG and other local officials.

“Let’s not table this any further,” King said. “We need to start something today because we have people who are mad about this.”