The Elizabethtown City Council met for a work session Monday afternoon.
Officer Chris Elam provided an update on the city’s enforcement of the recovery residence ordinance that went on the books in 2024. Elam said there are 89 sober living facilities located within city limits, and three in unincorporated Hardin County the city provides enforcement for. Elam said while it was hard to show a data point on how the situation has improved since the ordinance was passed, he provided an example of a facility that made no effort to provide its residences with better living conditions or to meet requirements for certification that eventually departed the city.
“If these people didn’t care enough about the people in the apartment to worry about him having hot water and power, they’re not going to care about anything else going on in that apartment or outside that apartment,” Elam said. “If they can’t even get an application started, they don’t have the skill set to run the program, so that is a huge circus that we’re not dealing with, the citizens of E-Town are not dealing with.”
Elizabethtown Mayor Jeff Gregory noted that prior to the ordinance there were more than 160 such facilities in the city. Elam said the ordinance at least weeds out bad operators.
“There’s some of the people operating these places that are very good,” Elam said. “They actually care about what they’re doing. They keep and maintain nice places. They work with me. I ask them to do stuff, and usually it’ll be done that day or very quickly afterwards. I get very few complaints.”
Elizabethtown Planning and Development Director Joe Reverman gave an update on his office’s accomplishments last fiscal year and its goals for the next year. Reverman said the office has been focusing on topics such as housing affordability, roadway safety, walkability, and historic preservation. That includes new standards to give developers more flexibility and expanding historic preservation.
“One of the hurdles that every community has when they’re adopting preservation is getting community buy-in on that because it’s hard to convince citizens to allow more regulation on their property, but there are a lot of benefits for preservation and we’re trying to get that word out, get that education out about what those benefits are,” Reverman said.
Reverman said since January 2022, when development spiked following the BlueOval SK announcement, 2,893 new homes have been constructed, with another 1,517 in the planning phase.
The Elizabethtown City Council will next meet September 15.
