Slatington Borough resident Lisa Shellhammer has had many issues with the town over the years, but the biggest one is the neighboring building at 348 W. Church St.

"The home has been a problem for seven years," she told the council during Monday night's meeting."Pigeons have moved in to the home and now they are ruining my property."She told the board she has to wash off her deck nightly now due to the birds in the vacant house."There are gaping holes in every room. It's just falling apart. They left bags of trash outside and inside," she said.According to Shellhammer, a building inspector informed her of mold in the building along with rain water-filled buckets on the third floor."It's a big problem. The mortgage company keeps putting it up for auction but no one is going to buy it for what they are asking. It's been auctioned five times this year," she said.According to borough manager Duane Dellecker, the property is "on our radar. It's been very hard to get the mortgage company to do anything."Slatington solicitor Tom Anewalt assured the resident that the borough was "working on it.""We can get court orders to get it cleaned up," he said."We've been to court before. The property owner has never showed up. We've won the citations but nothing happened," Dellecker said."It's going to fall on the borough to clean it up and put a lien on the property. We have options. We'll talk about it and the council will notify you," Anewalt told Shellhammer.The property in question is just one example of why the board hired a part-time code enforcer. Clark Ritter was sworn in to the position during the meeting with a pay rate of $11.92 an hour at 20 hours a week."And this is covered in the budget?" councilman Bryon Reed asked."They want to hire a manager. That's $80,000 and it keeps going up and up. I'm just looking at the dollars," he said."Bottom line is you're just trying to stop it," Councilman Jon Rinker said."Bottom line is we can't keep going the way we are going," Councilman Joe Wechsler said.After a smattering of applause from the residents in attendance, the board voted to hire Ritter. Reed was the only one to vote against Ritter's hire."Because of the money," he said."We have the money," Rinker said.The next issue was the roof repair needed for the borough building. Two areas need work and the board received quotes from two different companies for the repairs."W.S. and Sons Construction quoted us $4,967 for a metal roof on the south side and Paul Wright said $1,490 for above the carport," said Rinker."To do metal and shingle, it's kind of mismatched," Reed said.Rinker said those were the only two bids received for the job."I don't think I want a metal roof on this building because of the aesthetic," council President Gwyneth Jones said."It's a historic building," Reed said.The board voted to award the carport roof repair to Wright but decided to table the metal roof discussion until more research could be done on the shingle option."The slate has out lived its life. It's over 100 years old. You can only do so much with it," Rinker said."We were under the impression we were going to do metal until it's completely done, not put some metal on and then wait 10 years," he said."It's a nice, clean look. A lot of churches use it now," Wechsler said."They started out with a plan 10 years ago to do shingles and now we're changing horses midstream," Councilman David Schnaars said."Metal we can always match in the future. Shingles will always be mismatched," Wechsler said."Maybe you're not tired of it, but I'm tired of living in a place that always looks like it's second rate," he said.Jones agreed, saying, " A lot of buildings in the borough have not been maintained. That was our goal when we started."