Columbus is ready to crack down on nuisance hotels that official say are overrun with drugs and prostitution.
The Columbus City Council is set to pass an ordinance Monday that allows the city to issue permits to hotels and motels.
City leaders say hotels that are plagued by problems and exhaust police resources could have their license yanked.
“We are going after the worst of the worst,” said Council Member Zach Klein. “That is a priority for us. We want to applaud and commend good businesses and then make sure bad businesses are held accountable.”
Klein says the new ordinance gives the city the power to shut down a hotel that blatantly refuses to clean up its act without needing to go through a lengthy court process.
In recent years, the city prosecutor’s office deployed nuisance abatement laws to target several hotels along the 161 corridor.
Ken Gilbert is the president of the Forest Park Civic Association. He says his neighborhood was threatened when nearby hotels became havens for prostitutes and drug dealers desperate for money.
“How would they get money? Well, they went shopping. They went shopping in other people's houses in our neighborhood. We had a lot of break-ins. We had a lot of robberies,” he said.
Gilbert says legitimate business owners were also suffering.
"They were told they had to lock their bathroom doors because people were going in there shooting up,” he said.
Neighbors joined forces with police and prosecutors to have the courts declare the hotels a nuisance and shut down the businesses. Gilbert says it was a worthwhile but lengthy process.
Now, city hall has come up with a formula to target crime ridden hotels that are a drain on police resources.
City leaders say the ordinance creates a 1.2 ratio. Simply put, for every 10 hotel rooms, police can answer 12 calls for service a year.
Police say in 2013 and 2014, officers responded to more than 800 calls for service at Knight's Inn on Dublin Granvillle Road.
Gilbert says those officers are now free to patrol his neighborhood.
"They use to have hundreds of calls for service to these hotels,” Gilbert said. “When they're (at the hotels) they can't be in our neighborhoods.”
Gilbert says the Northland community is hopeful developers will find new uses for the now vacant hotels.
"There's a lot of life left in these buildings, he said. “We don't want these buildings to lie vacant but we'd rather have them empty than be a den of criminals.”
The new ordinance takes effect on January 1, 2016.
The city of Columbus says hotels and motels would risk losing an operator’s permit if they exceed a reasonable number of police calls for service based on the number of rooms available. We’ve highlighted the businesses that Columbus police say currently exceed the ratio. The new ordinance won’t take effect until 2016.
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