Anti-crime efforts pay off in downtown Marysville

MARYSVILLE — The return of rainy weather and the start of the school year means Comeford Park is quiet again.

This summer, the park was packed every day with kids frolicking in the city’s new spray park while their families socialized under the trees. That meant there were much fewer homeless people and drug dealers there.

“That spray park was really the right thing to get these families in here,” said Pat Olson, a volunteer at the Ken Baxter Community Center. “You don’t see so many of the homeless here to scare them away.”

Over the past two years, the city has embarked on an effort to revitalize downtown.

The area of focus, between Ash to Alder avenues and First and Ninth streets, is only about 2 percent of the city’s area, but it accounts for 20 percent of drug-related crimes.

Police worked closely with the fire department, Planning and Community Development, Public Works, and Parks and Recreation. Results are starting to show: Assaults were down 40 percent in the first half of 2014 compared with the same period in 2013. Burglaries fell 59 percent, theft dropped 24 percent, vehicle theft is down 30 percent.

“There was an element of crime down there that was scaring people out of the area,” said Marysville Police Chief Rick Smith.

The City Council enacted a Stay Out of Drug Areas ordinance, which allows the city to prohibit certain criminals from the downtown area or face arrest or fines.

But Smith realized enforcement alone wasn’t enough to combat perennial problems, such as a notorious drug house at First Street and Columbia Avenue.

Police officers who had been inside the house while responding to calls noticed that the house had no running water or electricity.

“We had been in there and realized it was uninhabitable. In fact, it’s dangerous to be in there,” Smith said.

That gave the city the leverage it needed: code enforcement.

“There was a lot of undesirable activity taking place,” said Marysville Fire Marshal Tom Maloney.

The fire district and city departments worked to apply existing city rules to the house, he said.

The property owner was given time to fix problems. That didn’t happen, Maloney said. After a city hearing, the house was razed.

Rebecca Read, who moved into a house on Third Street a few years ago, said she has seen a reduction in the number of transients walking through her neighborhood.

“It’s looking up. I still can’t let my son out by himself at night, and he’s 12,” Read said. “It’s slowly getting better, and after three and a half years, that’s a good thing,” she said.

There are other houses in the area that have the city’s attention, said Gloria Hirashima, the city’s chief administrative officer. She expects they will also be addressed by marshalling the entire city apparatus to look at criminal activity, livability and safety.

Crime and cleanliness have been top priorities for residents for years, she said. That led to the expansion of the annual Clean Sweep program into a year-round effort, with Public Works staff who are based downtown taking a more active role in noticing problems — whether it be drug activity, homeless encampments or aggressive panhandling — and reporting problems to the police.

“Public Works used to drive by and not pay attention. Now we’re paying attention,” Public Works director Kevin Nielsen said.

That was the same thought when the city decided to move forward with a spray park.

Originally the city considered other locations, but Comeford Park came to be seen as an opportunity to help draw a better element downtown.

“My whole goal there was simply to have the park downtown,” Hirashima said. “We tend to do more projects in suburban settings because they’re more pristine. Our goal is to get the downtown on the path to turning it around.”

The results have been dramatic. The city Parks and Recreation Department saw crowds of up to 1,000 people at Comeford Park on some days this summer, said director Jim Ballew. He estimates that 35,000 people came to the spray park over the 72 days it was in operation.

That, in turn, has kept undesirable elements away, and there has been a corresponding drop in the amount of litter, syringes, condoms and graffiti in the park, Ballew said.

“Making the decision to place the facility there was not necessarily the best location to put a spray park, but the best location to change our community profile,” Ballew said.

He passed along an anecdote from his staff, who saw two suspected drug dealers at a table in the park.

“A mom and three kids came up and asked if they could share the table with them. They left and didn’t come back for the rest of the summer,” Ballew said.

At the same time, two police school resource officers, Dave White and Chris Sutherland, proposed a plan to become bicycle officers downtown for the summer, Chief Smith said, and the two reported up to 800 contacts, arrests or other actions in a two-month period.

There is more work to do. Smith is putting together a regional task force to combat property crime, which he said will give his own department more flexibility in combating other local problems.

Over on Third Street, Darilee Bednar, who has owned 3rd Street Book Exchange for 25 years, said she’s still dealing with chronic burglaries, including one Aug. 11 in which thieves took nearly $6,000 worth of comics, her cellphone, a coffee maker, $75 worth of coffee and even the soap dishes from her bathroom.

Suspects in that burglary, who also allegedly burglarized several area churches, were recently caught, but Bednar still sees signs of decay that she hopes can be fixed.

“I have had people camping under my stairs. If I wanted to get rid of anything I could put it outside and it would be gone the next day,” she said.

Read, her neighbor down the street, agreed that there’s more work to be done, and she keeps an eye out in the neighborhood.

“If I see people going up the street at 2 a.m., or I see a bunch of kids, I’m going to want to know what they’re doing. I’m going to let the police know,” she said.

She just hopes more people in the neighborhood will do the same.

Herald writer Rikki King contributed to this report.

Chris Winters: 425- 374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.