ZELIENOPLE — Landlords and businesses in Zelienople soon may face a safety inspection requirement.

Borough Council on Monday approved the advertisement of two ordinances which would implement safety inspections for commercial and multi-tenant residential buildings, respectively. Council will consider those ordinances at a future meeting.

Jason Sarver, the borough’s code enforcement and zoning officer, said the inspections would be visual, adding he would be looking for items such as exposed wiring.

“My goal is to avoid hazards, accidents, catastrophes,” Sarver said.

The inspections, according to Sarver, would be based on the borough’s building codes. He said inspections would be for safety purposes, rather than looking at the overall maintenance of the buildings.

Sarver said inspections of the type council will consider in the future could help both business owners and residents by, for example, reducing fire hazards and other potential dangers to occupants of the buildings.

“I've worked for a lot of communities, municipalities, in the past, and they've all had certain inspections that — it's not a maintenance inspection, it's a safety inspection,“ Sarver said. ”It's really a way to have your thumbs on the safety of the businesses that all your patrons are coming in and out of, and it's based on a property maintenance code that we already have adopted.“

The inspections would be the responsibility of landlords for both commercial and residential buildings, according to Sarver, rather than the tenants.

According to Sarver, Zelienople has more than 1,000 residential dwelling units owned by 179 landlords, leading to an average of roughly six units per landlord. He said that figure is the number of people living in a house whose names are not on a deed.

Borough manager Don Pepe said the ordinances, should they pass, could help tenants — both commercial and residential — by identifying unsafe properties.

“We've had situations where renters have called us about where they live, and there's nothing, really, we could do,” Pepe said.