Item 18 on the Town of Salina’s July 13 agenda does not look like much. It is a single line, “Motion to approve Clean-Up Orders,” followed by a list.

The list runs from a to kk. Thirty seven properties, each one identified by tax map number and street address.

CNY Signal went through all of them. They are spread across 26 different streets in a town of roughly 33,000 people, and they are not evenly spread. Eight streets appear more than once, and the pattern of where they cluster says more about how code enforcement actually works than the total does.

Fairmount Avenue accounts for four of the 37: 249, 329, 331 and 335. Three of those are close enough together to be neighbors.

Galster Avenue accounts for three, and two of them have no street number at all. They appear in the records as 0 Galster Ave, which is how a municipality writes down a vacant parcel that has no building on it.

Six more streets appear twice each: Boston Road at 312 and 513, Kenwick Drive at 528 and 534, East Molloy Road at 301 and 805, Old Liverpool Road at 634 and 703, Sun Harbor Drive at 101 and 111, and Woods Avenue at 116 and 120. On three of those six, the two properties are near neighbors.

The remaining 18 streets appear once apiece.

### What a clean-up order actually is

A clean-up order is not a fine and it is not a condemnation. It is the step in between.

When a property falls below a town’s property maintenance standards, tall grass, accumulated debris, a collapsing accessory structure, the code office issues a notice to the owner. If the owner does not act, the town board can authorize the town to do the work itself and bill the cost back to the property, usually by adding it to the tax bill.

That is why these show up on a board agenda at all. The board is not deciding whether a yard is messy. It is authorizing the town to spend public money on private property and then recover it.

Three of the 37 parcels have no street number, meaning there is no house on them. Vacant lots turn up on clean-up lists at a rate out of proportion to their share of the housing stock, for a simple reason: nobody lives there to notice, and an absentee owner two states away has little reason to mow.

One of the three vacant parcels is on Electronics Parkway, which is not a residential street at all. It runs through the industrial and office corridor near the old Electronics Park complex.

The clustering is the more interesting finding. When a code office brings four properties on one street and two properties three doors apart on another, it usually reflects one of two things. Either an inspector worked a block systematically and wrote up everything that qualified, or the block itself has a shared underlying problem, an absentee landlord holding several parcels, a stalled estate, a stretch of rental housing under common ownership.

The agenda does not distinguish between those explanations, and CNY Signal is not asserting one. What the geography does establish is that these 37 orders are not scattered randomly across a town of 33,000 people. Roughly half of them sit on eight streets.

### The town already hired the crews

The detail that makes the list concrete sits three items earlier on the same agenda.

Item 12 is a motion to accept the bid submitted by AAA Quick Plows and Lawns for 2026-27 clean-ups. Item 13 is a motion to accept the bid submitted by TPM General Contractors for 2026-27 board-ups.

Those are the contractors. When a clean-up order is not satisfied by the owner, somebody has to physically show up with equipment and do the work, and somebody has to board a vacant structure when it is open to the weather or to trespassers. Salina bids that work out annually.

Reading items 12, 13 and 18 together gives you the whole machine in one meeting: the town lines up the crews for the year, then authorizes the addresses those crews may be sent to.

The board also handled a separate structural case at its next meeting. The August 10 agenda includes a motion to schedule a public hearing for an unsafe structure at 211 Vardon Street for Monday, September 14 at 6:31 pm. An unsafe structure hearing is a more serious proceeding than a clean-up order, and it is the process a town uses before it can order a building repaired or demolished.

### The rest of a working Tuesday

The clean-up list was not the only thing the board did on July 13, and the rest of the agenda is a decent portrait of what a town government of this size handles in one night.

Two hires. Beatrice Hasan was appointed Clerk I under the NY HELPS program at an hourly rate of $25.72, effective June 29. Bridget McHale was appointed Clerk to the Town Justice at $31.05 an hour, effective July 14.

One liquor license question. The board considered waiving the 30 day waiting period for a liquor license at 663 Old Liverpool Road, for PB&J’s Lunch Box LLC. Municipalities get a comment window on liquor license applications, and waiving it lets an applicant move faster.

One construction change order. The board took up authorization for the supervisor to sign SJ Thomas Change Order No. 9 for the Community Center. A ninth change order on a single project is worth noting on its own.

One personnel policy. The board considered adding an Incoming and Outgoing Employee Key Policy to the employee handbook, which is exactly what it sounds like and is the kind of thing that gets written after something goes wrong.

And three public hearings scheduled for August 10, stacked one minute apart at 6:31, 6:32 and 6:33 pm: a zone change at 661 Old Liverpool Road from C-3 to C-1, a local law decreasing the number of tobacco licenses in the town from 28 to 27, and a local law imposing a Repurposing and Reuse Floating Overlay District on 6701 Buckley Road.

### The full list

Because the agenda is a public document and residents have a right to know what is on it, here is the complete list of the 37 properties, in the order the town listed them.

On Beechwood Avenue, 187. On South Berwick Road, 212. On Boston Road, 312 and 513. On Brewerton Road, 2702. On Carolyn Avenue, 108. On Craigie Street, 344. On Douglas Avenue, 101. On Driftwood Drive, 4867. On Electronics Parkway, a parcel with no street number.

On Fairmount Avenue, 249, 329, 331 and 335. On Floradale Road, 213. On Galster Avenue, two parcels with no street number and one at 301. On Hanover Avenue, 200. On Inglesid Lane, 57. On Irving Avenue, 140. On Kenwick Drive, 528 and 534. On Minuteman Lane, 5086. On Mitchell Avenue, 115.

On East Molloy Road, 301 and 805. On Noble Avenue, 335. On Old Liverpool Road, 634 and 703. On Pleasantview Drive, 301. On Sun Harbor Drive, 101 and 111. On Teall Avenue, 1912. On Volney Drive, 202. On Woods Avenue, 116 and 120.

Each carries a tax map number in the agenda, which is the identifier that ties a clean-up order to a specific parcel regardless of what the mailing address says. That matters for the three lots with no street number, where the tax map number is the only way to tell one from another. The two vacant Galster Avenue parcels, for instance, are distinguished only as 069.-07-13.1 and 069.-07-13.2.

### What we could not confirm

The minutes for the July 13 meeting had not been posted when this story published, and neither had the minutes for August 10. Everything above comes from the published agendas, which record what the board was asked to do rather than what it decided.

That distinction matters. An agenda item that reads “Motion to approve Clean-Up Orders” tells you the code office brought 37 properties forward. It does not by itself prove every one was approved, and boards do pull individual items.

CNY Signal will update this story when Salina posts the minutes. The town’s agendas and minutes are published at salinany.gov, and the town board meets at 201 School Road in Liverpool, generally on the second and fourth Monday of the month at 6:30 pm.

If your address is on that list, the practical advice is the same one code officers give every time: the cheapest outcome is almost always to do the work yourself before the town does it for you and bills you.