Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Byron Wolfsong is a strong supporter of property rights, but he believes those rights have limits.
Wolfsong, the city’s new code enforcement officer, was eyeing a property under code enforcement action by the city with Community Development Coordinator Carol Lewis.
This particular property has been an ongoing code enforcement problem for the city, and the owners would probably be angry, Lewis noted.
They’re “property rights people,” she said.
Sometimes, Wolfsong replied, people just wave their private property rights around in protest when they really just use it for a crutch and an excuse for their messes.
That’s where Wolfsong comes in. He’s also the city’s new code enforcement officer. He started work on Sept. 1, and Lewis spent the day showing him the ropes.
Wolfsong left a six-month stint at Selmet in Albany earlier this month to begin working for the city.
He and his family moved to Sweet Home from east Contra Costa County, Calif., about an hour inland from San Francisco, in December 2004. They ended up in Sweet Home when they found a house to purchase here.
Wolfsong is married to Julie, who owns Gypsy Circle Belly Dancing. They have one daughter, Shiloh, 2.
“We liked Sweet Home because it was way off the beaten path,” Wolfsong said. “I like being an hour from the nearest mall.”
Wolfsong grew up in rural Oakley, Calif., a farming community, a place much like Sweet Home. He graduated from Liberty Union High School in 1994 and has attended college “here and there.”
He has been a security officer at a suburban mall, an undercover loss prevention specialist and a bouncer in a bar.
“Most of my jobs I’ve done in the security field are related to this,” he said. In these jobs, he interacted with police and enforced regulations.
“It’s related enough to what I went to school for,” Wolfsong said. He took criminal justice courses in college and spent six months at the police academy in California. He was in an extended, spread-out version of California’s 26-week course.
His knee gave out two weeks before graduation, and he didn’t become a police officer.
While attending police academy classes, he had a family and a job, he said.
“I was dedicated. It was all I ever wanted to do,” Wolfsong said. ” I was fairly well crushed.”
This “is in the same field, but the hours are better,” he said. “The reason I wanted to get involved in police work anyway was to help people, contribute toward the community and try to make a better place.”
As a code enforcement officer, he will get a similar opportunity.
“I’d like to kind of work with people to get them to see the value of cleaning up on their own, helping people understand the value of having a nice neighborhood and making things presentable,” Wolfsong said. He doesn’t want it to be like the city’s “kicking down your door,” but rather he wants to show people that giving rats and mice places to live is a bad idea.
He would rather see people “take pride in the community,” he said. “I’m not really here to be ‘the Man’ cramming things down people’s throats.”
Wolfsong succeeds Donnie Lindenman, who worked a little more than a month but had to quit for personal reasons. Mikayla Rossiter resigned earlier in the summer to attend school.