The City of Warren is working to develop a “community friendly” codes department.

Numerous staffing changes and a shift to third-party commercial construction codes management mean that the department is in some sense starting from scratch.

Randy Rossey has been appointed to lead the department and handle the city’s zoning ordinance, as well. Scott Taylor has been hired as the new zoning and ordinance enforcement official.

At Wednesday’s City of Warren Planning Commission meeting, Rossey had to jump from one side of the desk to the other. His resignation from the Commission – because he accepted his position with the city — was presented to the board at the beginning of the meeting.

Rossey said his professional experience includes over 30 years at Blair/Blue Stem and three years at Superior Tire. He also served for over nine years on the Redevelopment Authority and over two years on the Planning Commission.

“With the exception of (Code Official) Gary Shwartz, all of us in the codes department are new,” Rossey said. “It gives us an opportunity (we) don’t get often – to build the Codes Department the way we would like to see it.”

That means a “community friendly department.

“We are trying to create a department with codes officials who are interactive with the public,” he explained. “A lot of times when they interact with a codes official that first interaction can help resolve that issue right there.

“We want to be as people friendly as possible and we also want to work with people.”

Taylor said he joins the department after over 21.5 years of service with the city police department.

“(I’m) very pleased that Randy is down there. He and I have a lot of the same concepts,” he said. “A lot of it is community-oriented. Our big concept is meeting people, talking with people, getting these problems and issues taken care of.”

PUBLIC MEETING DISCUSSED

Commission members were pleased by the turnout at a comprehensive plan public meeting held last week.

“I thought the event went really well,” Rossey said. “(There was a) lot of interaction which we wanted to see.”

Commission member Randy Gustafson said that one idea from the session was to get an ongoing public survey distributed in paper form and member Mike Suppa suggested reaching out to local businesses to distribute the survey to their employees.

With Rossey’s resignation, there’s an opening on the commission. Anyone interested should call the municipal building.