CHRISTY GUNVALSEN, NEIGHBORHOOD PRESERVATION MANAGER – CODE ENFORCEMENT INTERVIEW BY LEKHANA VANKAYALA AND SANJNA JAIN Q: Can you give us an overall idea of what your job is like and what you would do on a normal day? A: Hello, my name is Christy Gunvalsen, and I'm the neighborhood preservation manager of Sunnyvale. Not a lot of people know what that means, but what it means is, code enforcement. So I manage a code enforcement program. Code enforcement is when we have staff who will go out and enforce municipal code violations, which are violated by property owners or business owners. We want to promote attractive wellmaintained residential and business properties, reducing blight, but we try to do that through compliance and education first because we don't want to issue citations to people for violating municipal codes. But what we want to do instead, is tell them what the violation is and why we are enforcing the code. So for example if somebody has junk and debris out on their lawn,
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you know just a bunch of stuff, what we'll do is we'll go and we'll send him a kind of courtesy notice and we say this is a violation of the municipal code, we want to keep all of the neighborhood's clean and well-kept and so will give you a certain time period in order to comply with removing it and most of the time they do they get rid of it and sometimes they'll say, oh, I didn't realize that cities did this, and we don't expect people to know that. So we inform them- educate, educate, educate, but sometimes we have people who say, hey this is my property I can do with it, whatever i want and then we try to explain to them, again why we are forcing these things. For example, say there is vegetation over growing on the sidewalk in front of the house. Now you don't normally think this is a big deal right but strollers, wheelchairs, and people can't access the sidewalk when the vegetation is covering it. We also have people living in converted garages that don't have a permit for their converted garage
because all livable space has to have heat, electricity, and all that good stuff so that's what we do. We give people plenty of time to comply and then if they don't comply by the deadline, we give them another deadline to comply. So again it's education, education, and then if they don't we issue administrative citations, so we try and keep the city clean. Q: Then what role would you say STEM plays in this career, how do you use them on a daily basis? A: We use technology on a daily basis. So, what we do is every single property in the city has a parcel address. We have a system: a GIS (Geographic Information System), which is a space mapping system and we can type in the physical address of the property and then all the history of code enforcement issues and violations we linked with the building department and planning department pops up from the GIS databases. So, if we're driving around and we see a house that looks like they're doing illegal construction or something just
● Interview: Christy Gunvalsen, Neighborhood Preservation Manager
STEMATIX Magazine
