Gulf Shores Councilman Jason Dyken wants to form a committee to discuss ways to decrease the number of empty buildings and office spaces in the city.

“Something that’s been near and dear to my heart and something that’s been bothering me for quite a while in this community and that’s the fact that we have many commercial buildings in this community that are empty,” Dyken said.

And, he says, it’s not just one or two buildings or some that have recently become empty.

“They’ve been empty for a considerable amount of time. I’m not talking about the three to six months’ timeframe but buildings have been dormant for 12 months and greater and really, I think, serve as kind of a blight on our city,” Dyken said.

Current laws on the books regarding empty and neglected buildings may not go far enough, Dyken said.

“I know we have regulations and ordinances that can offer a stick to some of those owners to upgrade their buildings but I don’t know if it goes far enough,” he said. “I would like to set up a committee with (Community Development Director) Lee Jones to investigate what we can do to try and improve that situation.”

Once the committee is formed, Dyken said, it can study cities where the empty commercial properties were best addressed.

“The first step I’d like to do is figure out what we can do by borrowing best practices from across the country to incent owners of properties that are dilapidated to incent them to improve their properties or incent them to lease their properties so that we can have active businesses in those commercial buildings,” Dyken said. “And, really study that problem and study solutions for that problem.”

If the incentives aren’t enough to address the problems, a better law with more teeth should be studied to help with the problem, Dyken said.

“I would like to look at our ordinances about what we can do use the stick and penalize people for leaving their buildings in disrepair because I think it sets a tone for our community and that’s not really the tone that we want,” Dyken said. “We would love to try to incent businesses to grow here, incent commercial building owners to be profitable and to have tenants and really generate more economic development in our city.”

Along with Jones’ help, Dyken said he’d also like to discuss the plan with City Attorney Donald Stewart.

“I’ve asked Lee Jones if we can step forward with Donald Stewart’s assistance as well to kind of study the problem to see what other communities have done successfully and kind of evaluate our approach to this problem in this community,” Dyken said. “I’d like to move forward with that with the council’s blessings.”

There were no objections from the other four councilmen or Mayor Robert Craft.