City and state officials say that a North Baltimore doctor and newspaper publisher is responsible for one of the largest illegal tire junkyards in Maryland, and they are asking a District Court judge to force him to clean it up.
Dr. Bernard Kapiloff, a retired plastic surgeon, has failed for seven months to make good on promises to clean up his company's condemned 3-acre lot on a desolate dead end in Park Heights, officials say. The roughly 18,000 tires that fill a building and rusty trailers there make it one of the state's biggest unauthorized tire dumps, according to Maryland environmental officials.
"What stands out here is the size and type of violation," says Michael E. Braverman, chief of code enforcement for the city Department of Housing and Community Development. "This is an enormous snub to municipal government."
Kapiloff, 84, is publisher of The Prince George's Sentinel and The Montgomery County Sentinel, weekly newspapers in suburban Maryland. He was appointed by Gov. Parris N. Glendening last year to the state's Wellmobile Advisory Board, which helps bring health care services to poor neighborhoods.
City officials say the case, filed Thursday in District Court, is part of a campaign against the heaps of refuse that mar poor sections of the city. They say this case is particularly worrisome because of the large number of tires, which are breeding grounds for mosquitos and rats and can lead to fires.
The property goes by two addresses - 3643 Woodland Ave. and 4620 Doll Ave. - and is owned by The 3 MS at Woodland, a limited liability company in which Kapiloff is a corporate officer and resident agent, city officials say.
It sits at the far end of a strip of auto-repair shops off Reisterstown Road. A chain-link fence topped by barbed wire hems a weedy lot and a few ramshackle buildings, one of which is packed almost wall to wall with scrap tires. In the lot, tires spill from three trailers. A ridge of trash - discarded whiskey bottles, sofas, baby seats - creeps along the property's edge.
In its civil lawsuit, the city housing agency asks that Kapiloff be ordered to spruce up the property in 30 days and pay unspecified fines. The city estimates a cleanup will cost at least $93,000.
The filing of such a suit is relatively rare, with about four out of five housing code cases settling before they reach the courts.
Kapiloff refused to be quoted and referred all questions to his lawyer, James W. Motsay, who did not return telephone calls last week.
