Nearly three months after President Robert Caret pledged to address "nuisance houses" in the community, procedures to address the problem have yet to be developed.
Responding to community complaints about Towson students who host loud parties and disturb local neighborhoods, Caret told members of the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations Feb. 18 that the University was going to look at nuisance house legislation.
"We're looking at, how do you label a house a nuisance house? How many violations does it take? And if it is a nuisance house, what can we do?," he said.
He added: "We're hoping by mid-April to have a recommendation for next year's policy."
It's now mid-May. University officials have yet to submit a recommendation.
Vice President for Student Affairs Deb Moriarty said several meetings about the issue have been scheduled for the summer. Instead of creating a policy on nuisance houses, the University may develop a set of procedures that would detail the steps to take when repeated violations occur, Moriarty said on Friday.
Mike Ertel, president of the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations, said he hasn't heard from Towson about nuisance houses since Caret spoke to the group in February.
The GTCCA recently created a University relations committee. A meeting with Moriarty and Jennifer Gajewski, assistant to the president for governmental relations, is scheduled for Friday.
"Our hope is that the neighborhoods and Towson University can start cooperating a little bit," Ertel said. "-Although nothing's happened yet, we're hoping that we can just get the dialogue open." Ertel said there seems to be a lot of precedent for a nuisance house policy, citing Salisbury University and Loyola College as examples. It would "take some heat off the University," he said. It would give neighbors a clear sense of the process and give officials a standardized way to deal with problems.
In an interview late last month, Moriarty said student affairs staff members were collecting information from other schools about their procedures.
She expressed a desire to "balance students' need for independence off campus with the University's need for students to understand that they're identified with Towson when they're off campus."
"It's such a delicate balance," she emphasized.
The University is focusing its attention on groups of Towson students living together who draw attention to themselves through repeated offenses.
Administrators don't want to feel compelled to respond to each and every incident involving students in neighborhoods off-campus. (Even if they wanted to, they wouldn't have the resources to do it.) Determining at which point the University should get involved apparently hasn't been easy.
Moriarty said staffers are working on definitions, such as "what would have to happen to label this a nuisance house?"
She said lots of "informal" conversations have been taking place about the issue.
Procedures for dealing with repeat offenders may be developed over the summer.
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