T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY — Assistant Housing and Community Development Director Clayton Ender shares an update on property code enforcement with the Marshalltown City Council during Monday night’s meeting.

About 10 months after he identified 190 noncompliant properties and presented a report to the city council on the subject, Assistant Housing and Community Development Director Clayton Ender returned to the podium on Monday evening with what he described as a positive update regarding code compliance.

Ender said at least 30 properties were turned over to the city attorney’s office when the owners failed to communicate with city staff about the issues they found.

“We didn’t proceed through fines or anything, but there were a handful of cases we had to do that with. And in many of those cases, we agreed upon, with the property owner, that if they completed the work by a set time frame, there’d be no civil penalties for those, but if they failed to do that timeframe, then a civil penalty would be imposed,” he said. “I’m very pleased with how people responded to this. No one was thrilled about getting a notice that they had to fix it… but people acknowledged ‘Yeah, we need to do some work and get it done.’ And people did.”

The work continues into 2026, and since the beginning of March, 37 notices have been sent out with an emphasis on the major arterial roads, collector roads and commercial nodes within Marshalltown.

“The intent was to focus on areas of high visibility in anticipation of RAGBRAI coming into town in July, trying to get as many properties maintained as we can in advance of that,” Ender said.

The plan is to conduct a “pretty heavy, proactive” sweep of the community about two weeks in advance of the famous annual bike ride on nuisance enforcement with a 10-day period to address them.

“We’ve already made our contractor aware that they’re probably gonna be busy. I hope they’re not. I hope everyone just does everything and we don’t have issues, but we’ve already kind of cautioned them,” Ender said.

He also touched on parking code enforcement, especially with the new back-in angle configuration downtown, and Ender was happy to share that the city’s parking enforcement officer has recently noticed majority compliance on that front. One issue he plans to address further this year is yard parking in areas where gravel parking pads are overrun with grass and weeds.

As he opened up the floor for council questions and comments, Councilor Mark Mitchell commended Ender and his team for their efforts to clean up the city and urged his fellow city councilors to step up and health with code enforcement.

“We certainly welcome it and will receive any complaints that you have and address those. If we don’t get that, we will continue business as usual, proactive out on the ground, but we can’t have eyes everywhere at every point in time,” Ender said. “So if you do see something that needs addressed, I welcome you to send that my way and we’ll get our team on that.”

Mitchell then issued a challenge for the rest of the council.

“If you really want to make this town more beautiful, you’ll step up and help them out,” he said.

Fellow Councilor Jeff Schneider asked if the downtown pavement would be re-striped this year, and Public Works Director Heather Thomas replied that when pavement is installed later in the year, it doesn’t have time to cure before the marking is applied and wears off quickly.

“We have plans, early on, once we start our pavement marking crews up, which we’d like to wait until nighttime temperatures remain above 50 degrees relatively consistently,” she said. “Some of the areas downtown that have had new pavement here in the last couple years are definitely on the priority list.”

With regard to the back-in parking, Mayor Mike Ladehoff told Thomas he had heard from residents who felt that running the striping up the curb would make the process easier. She told him that city staff were looking into the cost and logistics of doing so.