Vacant Building

The City of Bay City is faced with increasing volumes of vacant structures including residential, commercial and industrial throughout the community.  These vacant structures are too often not properly attended to or maintained, resulting in blight and perceived disinvestment that is enormously harmful to the city.

As we proceed to implement the housing improvement strategy, a key element within our blight enforcement program is to closely monitor vacant structures which are inherently more likely than occupied properties to become blight and in the process ensure that they are maintained in a manner that does not detract from their surrounding neighborhoods.  The new vacant building registration and inspection program will require owners of properties vacant for ninety (90) days or more to register those properties with the City’s building code enforcement division.  A vacant building, including the surrounding real property, required to be registered shall be subject to additional exterior inspection based on the 2012 International Property Maintenance Code.  Owners will be required to pay an initial registration fee and quarterly fees to the City as long as the property remains vacant as follows:

Fee                 Description

$25.00            First-time registration of any vacant structure.

None              Quarterly charge – residential owner occupancy rescission waiver.

$75.00            Quarterly charge  - residential housing unit.

$105.00          Quarterly charge – commercial unit.

$105.00          Quarterly charge – industrial unit.

Vacant Building and Inspection Program

Vacant Building Registration Application