Riding in the field with Codes Enforcement Officer Beth Goodman, it makes complete sense that she has a degree in Social Work and spent 11 years as a crime scene investigator with KPD’s Forensics Unit.

During a recent City Council meeting, a resident praised Goodman's helpful and clear explanations of a neighborhood issue.

She has a keen eye for City codes violations--overgrown and dirty lots, illegal dumping, derelict properties. 

Her work truck is her desk and operations center. 

Goodman’s territory is Fort Sanders, the south side of Mechanicsville and South Knoxville. 

The sometimes shocking clutter in the front yards and alleys of the Fort is to be expected this time of year, she says. University students moving in and out of apartments and rental homes brings the simultaneous tumult of outgoing trash and discarded belongings and incoming shipping boxes and packaging of new televisions, furniture and small appliances. 
One house looks empty. The yard is overgrown, but there are signs of work in progress: a large shrub has been trimmed around its bottom half, with limbs laying in piles below.

Next door, vehicles crowd the small side yard and a half dozen garbage carts jumble in the street with loose garbage bags and cardboard boxes. Goodman marks down the address in her notebook and weighs the situation aloud.

“Do I write it up?” She knows Waste Connections will pick up the trash in the carts in three days on its regular collection day. What about the rest?

She thinks back to when she interviewed for the position.

“When Peter Ahrens asked me how I felt about gray, I thought he was crazy,” she says. “But everything in this job is gray. Nothing is black and white. You have to have some judgement.”

She says a solid majority of property owners will remedy a situation immediately. 

She has some property owners on speed dial and will call when she sees something, like the remnants of a keg party, and they’ll take care of the mess right away.

Goodman sees a neighbor cleaning up an alley and drives right up to him. He's the property's owner and relates his experience with a dumpster and people removing its contents and sleeping outdoors in the nearby trees. He's found hypodermic needles on the ground in the area. She hands him her card.

Signs of decline on one block are met with indications of improvement on another. A ramshackle Victorian on the corner of Highland and 17th Street has been stripped down to the studs in anticipation of a full renovation.

Across the river, Goodman visits a street that’s undergone a gradual transformation over the past few years. Part of its story is relatively common in neighborhoods across the city: an owner of several rental properties didn’t keep them up. Neighbors called 311 to report issues. Then someone purchased several of the properties and improved them.

Like every Codes Inspector for the City, Goodman observes the ebb and flow of city neighborhoods and helps manage what can be managed within the parameters of City law.  

She says the pandemic and its challenges have brought the Codes team members closer together.

Behind the calls and complaints, the unmowed yards and piles of trash, Beth Goodman sees residents’ complicated lives. She works with property owners and neighbors to prevent small issues from growing into big ones.