Code complaint escalates to crime
10 Connects-Cocoa, Florida – Brevard County calls the cars and other stuff parked and piled on Robert Biel’s Lake Drive property junk. Biel has maintained they’re his livelihood.
The confrontation near Cocoa started more than a decade ago and has led to violation notices, court-ordered cleanups and liens against the property.
Photo Gallery: Cocoa code complaint
Now, a trial is in the offing, maybe as soon as today – in connection to criminal charges filed by the state after Biel allegedly confronted code enforcement officers in February 2007 when they came to photograph and check on his property.
“I have never prosecuted a case like this before,” said Assistant State Attorney Rob Parker, a prosecutor for more than two decades and a division chief with the Brevard State Attorney’s office.
“There has been a history of filing and various actions. It goes back to the ’90s.”
It is one of the few code enforcement cases in the county that ballooned into criminal charges being filed.
Bobby Bowen, county code enforcement manager, declined to comment because he is a witness in the case. Calls to Biel, 55, were not returned, nor was a call to the Public Defender’s Office, which is representing him.
According to a letter Bowen wrote in 2007, Biel allegedly attempted to slap a camera from an officer’s hand and then tried to hit to hit another officer with a metal gate.
He faces third-degree felony charges of commercial dumping of more than 500 pounds and battery on a code enforcement officer. Both are punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The first code enforcement complaint against Biel was filed in June 1995, according to FLORIDA TODAY archives. In time, the county fined Biel more than $50,000 and put three liens on his property.
Other Lake Drive residents too have had problems with code enforcement over the years.
“It’s kind of the culture for that particular area,” Bowen said in an interview in 2006. “It’s the old broken-window theory, ‘If everybody else is doing it, why can’t I?’ ”
A letter Bowen sent to the state attorney’s office in 2007 about the Biel case said: “For more than 10 years the county has attempted to get the two property owners into compliance, without success. In 2003, the county entered Mr. Biel’s and (a co-owner’s) property at 1331 Lake Drive to clean the property under a court order.”
Brevard County calls the cars and other stuff parked and piled on Robert Biel’s Lake Drive property junk. Biel has maintained they’re his livelihood.
The confrontation near Cocoa started more than a decade ago and has led to violation notices, court-ordered cleanups and liens against the property.
Now, a trial is in the offing, maybe as soon as today – in connection to criminal charges filed by the state after Biel allegedly confronted code enforcement officers in February 2007 when they came to photograph and check on his property.
“I have never prosecuted a case like this before,” said Assistant State Attorney Rob Parker, a prosecutor for more than two decades and a division chief with the Brevard State Attorney’s office.
“There has been a history of filing and various actions. It goes back to the ’90s.”
It is one of the few code enforcement cases in the county that ballooned into criminal charges being filed.
Bobby Bowen, county code enforcement manager, declined to comment because he is a witness in the case. Calls to Biel, 55, were not returned, nor was a call to the Public Defender’s Office, which is representing him.
According to a letter Bowen wrote in 2007, Biel allegedly attempted to slap a camera from an officer’s hand and then tried to hit to hit another officer with a metal gate.
He faces third-degree felony charges of commercial dumping of more than 500 pounds and battery on a code enforcement officer. Both are punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The first code enforcement complaint against Biel was filed in June 1995, according to FLORIDA TODAY archives. In time, the county fined Biel more than $50,000 and put three liens on his property.
Other Lake Drive residents too have had problems with code enforcement over the years.
“It’s kind of the culture for that particular area,” Bowen said in an interview in 2006. “It’s the old broken-window theory, ‘If everybody else is doing it, why can’t I?’ ”
A letter Bowen sent to the state attorney’s office in 2007 about the Biel case said: “For more than 10 years the county has attempted to get the two property owners into compliance, without success. In 2003, the county entered Mr. Biel’s and (a co-owner’s) property at 1331 Lake Drive to clean the property under a court order.”
An inventory during the cleanup found 82 junk vehicles, debris and one pig. It cost the county $9,000, the letter said.
In 2006, another court-ordered cleanup of Biel’s property cost $10,000. Code enforcement officers, sheriff’s deputies and county employees were involved in the operation. Items removed during this clean up included a dilapidated mobile home without a permit, cargo trailers and vehicle engines, doors and tires.
A report documenting the cleanup said: “Argument over the validity of what is junk, what was allowed to be openly stored and what could be removed was constant and forceful.”
“Both Mr. Biel and (the co-owner) have been openly defiant in bringing their property, they jointly own, into compliance with Brevard County’s Code of Ordinance,” said the letter, asking that Biel be prosecuted.
Biel has told county officials that they “were removing his livelihood.” His third-acre property is a zoned for mixed-use commercial.
But county officials allege in their documents that Biel has run an unlicensed automotive repair business from the address. “A junkyard is not a permitted use on (that) zoned property,” said one of the reports.
Court records show Biel has filed for bankruptcy.
