Board of Aldermen Page 7
June 14, 2016
President McCarthy
Mr. Ball, please address your comments to the Board.
Attorney Ball
| just wanted to share those, thank you. Peter did offer to work with the Substandard Living Conditions
Committee and drafted the appropriate language, language that he felt at the time was agreeable with
some Aldermen and some of the inspectional services representatives but the original proposed
ordinance was sent to this Board with no changes. | am here to formally request that you either table this
tonight until the 28", send it back to the sub-committee to defer the work or you deny it outright. | feel
that it is incomplete and | feel that you have a roomful of people here that are willing to work with you
even though the proposal on its face is to set up a fine system against property owners in town. They do
agree with the reasoning behind it but they just want some input and tweak it to get it right. The major
points of Peter's memo are number one, the discretion because it gives the appearance of favoritism.
There is a concern with new inspectors with how you go ahead and set up the inspection intervals,
selective enforcement, whether its complaint based or regular intervals. We feel that with some input this
could be added to the Bill. We are hoping to actually have mandatory warnings and that way everything
is On paper and everything is on the record and is searchable and reviewable and there is nothing
hidden. Of course, the major course is the need for an administrative appeal even just a limited notice
fast track appeal right now would be helpful. The district court process is not the appeal: you are getting
fined, your fine is being increased and you have to go to district court and you are being slightly being
pressured into paying the fine as soon as possible otherwise it could potentially go up. To the best of my
knowledge there have only been a handful of cases last year that ended up in district court. | understand
part of the reason behind the legislation is to prevent or limit the amount of times people end up in district
court but | think the reverse is going to happen, you are going to have people that are forced to pay a
fine in a quick period of time so it doesn’t increase and they will be willing to pay more money just to go
to district court and have their voices heard. They want an opportunity to voice explanations; you have
issues such as tenant sabotage as they have mentioned kicking a hole in the wall, issues such as
contractor delay, natural disasters and things like vacations and sicknesses. This falls into the third
point, the time element of the ten days to comply. Well ten days is fine for some things but probably too
quick for other things like cracked siding and things like that are not really crucial. As the first woman
who spoke tonight mentioned Section 8 and | am pretty sure that Section 8 has a thirty day window so
we are looking for a sliding scale and we think with more input and better definitions we can give a
seriousness approach; health and safety, obviously those are crucial and need to be fixed as soon as
possible and allow the property owners to give explanations and come up with a reasonable solution and
a fourth major point is obviously the fine system. You have this time occurrence versus an event
occurrence so if the fine; every single day it’s a new fine for the same occurrence. | mean we
understand where you are coming from and the need to get these things done but it just seems like with
a little bit more input and of course allowing a little bit more input whether it goes back to the sub-
committee or even if it’s just tabled; there’s a whole roomful of people who want to give input and
obviously many of them know a lot more about different construction issues than | do but it seems like
there could be more thought into the fine process. Of course if you had an appeal you could suspend
the fine during an appeal. There is no process, if you go to district court and you win your case there is
nothing in there about being reimbursed in case you had to pay a fine. Looking at the ordinance itself it
borders on a violation, it’s a constitutional violation of due process. You are obligating people to pay
these fines, there being increased every day possibly and then after the fact they end up in court. The
court system seems to have worked for a long time now, obviously this is an attempt to limit the amount
of times that this ends up in court but as far as you know, you will probably have due process challenges
and in my opinion it’s not likely to survive. The ordinance is very vague and the person responsible for
the violation; it could use some definitions, it’s going to assume it’s the property owner every time and
once again they have been told that the inspectors are reasonable and understandable but it’s just too
open-ended and too ripe for abuse. With some better language the ordinance could be properly drafted
