Westmoreland redevelopment officials Monday announced a renewed focus on community blight prevention, hoping to nip future problems in the bud.

“We want to be proactive in providing our communities with a plan. We don’t want to just be a demolition authority,” agency Executive Director Brian Lawrence said.

The effort comes just months after county leaders unveiled a $10.4 million plan to demolish as many as 300 blighted properties in the coming years.

The land bank and redevelopment authority will host a conference Oct. 14 at Westmoreland County Community College near Youngwood that will serve as a primer for local leaders about how to prevent properties from falling into a state of disrepair so dire that demolition is required.

Scheduled speakers will discuss tools available to local governments to head off potential blight, Lawrence said.

“There are 30-plus tools the state has provided for vacant, abandoned and blighted properties, and 29 of them are tools that can be used before the land bank gets involved,” Lawrence said.

The idea, he said, is that public officials can identify properties that are in need of repairs and take corrective actions before those structures become dangerous eyesores and targets for demolition.

Officials have estimated there are as many as 1,200 blighted properties throughout the county’s 65 municipalities. The county several years ago instituted a demolition fund, paid for by a $15 surcharge placed on deed and mortgage filings, that is used to tear down blighted structures each year.

Commissioners this summer allocated $10.4 million of the county’s more than $105 million in federal covid-relief funds toward aggressive blight remediation.

The redevelopment authority and land bank are coordinating efforts to identify structures to be rehabilitated or demolished in Arnold, Greensburg, Jeannette, Monessen, New Kensington, Penn Borough and Vandergrift as part of that effort.

Lawrence said this month’s seminar will serve as a followup to a “boot camp” in April for municipal and government leaders in the first of what officials said will be an annual gathering to address issues surrounding blight.

“What ends up coming to us is the worst of the worst circumstances. We’re trying to pick up the pieces 10 to 15 years later,” Lawrence said. “This is us doing something now so we don’t have to talk about tearing down these buildings.”

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