By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- Blighted properties are prompting the Town Council to consider code revisions.

“There’s a blighted property in the township, it’s obvious this is blighted property … the way the code is written now, the only thing they can do is write them a letter. There’s no enforcement,” Councilman Albert Nicola said.

He declined to name the property, but said the code office did send the owner and letter and “the person did clean up part of it on their own.”

Councilman Tom Miller said he wants to consider something similar to the village’s points-based system for determining blight. The code assigns point values to various deficiencies, and when a property hits 100 points, it’s considered blighted and the code office can take action.

“It’s pretty powerful with the point system,” Miller said.

Town attorney Eric Gustafson said he might be able to find means already on the books to take action against blighted lots.

“I’ve got to go back and check, but if someone gave me the details, I could go and maybe find a solution that’s acceptable to the board,” he said in reference to the property Nicola mentioned.

Miller said after talking to code officials, he thinks the town needs to fix specific sections of the code, but a full overhaul isn’t the way to go.

“We need to change this one portion of our town code so we can enforce several things,” Miller told the board. “I think the process for this town board is to take recommendations from the code office, look at it in individual sections … let’s not change the whole town code.”