Board of Aldermen Page 23
June 14, 2016
statement is that the attorney’s that spoke are working off of the wrong copy of the legislation possibly
and | think they are doing a disservice to their constituents, that’s my opinion. | don’t know what actually
happened there but | can only ascertain that from the comments that nothing changed because that’s not
the case. | would also point out that there has been mention of an unreasonable timeframe, ten days or
what not, please refer, again, to the discretion clause in which it specifically talks about a reasonable and
certain timeframe. The reasonable and certain timeframe in committee that we talked about was
explicitly dependent on what the nature of the problem was. If you are doing a roof it is very reasonable
to assume that is going to take quite a long period of time and in fact the way things work is that as long
as there is some due diligence to pursue a remedy for a problem then there is no issue. This ordinance
addresses the instance where code enforcement is notified of a problem and at that point there is a
waiting period where there can be a full remedy and if a phone call is made that this is remedied or the
reporting tenant for example, doesn’t follow-up then code enforcement has no action and nothing
happens. Now we get to the point where there is follow-up and at this point, assuming that people are
reasonable, which is generally the case, and in fact codified, a warning is issued in which they talk about
it. Remember that the warning is only issued in the event that there has been no effort at that point to
correct the problem so we are now at the point where no effort has been made to correct the problem
and we are going to issue a warning and hopefully something will be done, again the timeframe is not
specified in the legislation, this ten days is a mythology and | don’t know where that came from. There is
no hard limit; everyone recognizes that there are different problems that require different timeframes so
that is kind of silly in that sense. You literally have to be a willful violator. As far as the notion of an
Appeals Board, we currently have a code system. There was some reference to all of the different
clauses that were in the legislation, all that is the restatement of the existing code, there are no new
clauses or magic police powers, we just restated what is in the blue book and | might also say that this
ordinance goes beyond the scope of landlords. Not a single restaurant owner has testified that there is
an issue and restaurant owners are covered. Anybody with life/safety issues is covered. This is general
enforcement of ordinances by the code enforcement department. The idea that somehow we are going
after people and this is going to be an additional expense, right now if the city were to be a police state or
to “go after people” our only course of action would be to take people to court. Now, everybody who
owns property most likely is a corporation which means you can’t represent yourself in court and you are
hiring an attorney. That attorney is going to click out at about $250.00 per hour and up and there’s going
to be a retainer fee and that’s a whole heck of a lot of money that’s going to occur. That’s the remedy
right now; go to court so a vindictive city government would go and rototill everybody in court if that’s in
fact the police state tactics that we are talking about. By the way, there is no Board of Appeals right now
so right now we are in a situation where code enforcement exists and there is no Appeals Board that we
have right now and you would go to court. That’s your first step. This is codifying discretion and
providing an intermediate step which you don’t even get to unless you are willfully violating the
ordinances. | rarely get too wrapped up in legislation and | understand there are two sides of an issue
and just for example, the pension fund legislation, it was a hard fought discussion and | felt strongly and
other people had reasonable objections and that’s fair, it didn’t pass. In this case | have actually yet to
hear a reasonable objection. | have heard objections but I’ve heard objections based on the wrong
legislation and | haven't heard anything reasonable associated with the exact legislation in front of us so |
would defer to our city attorney to comment on whether this would be unconstitutional or not and in fact |
would like to ask through the chair if Attorney Bolton might be willing to weigh in on a statement that was
made that somehow this is unconstitutional or there is no due process in here since | am not an attorney
and we have an attorney present.
Attorney Bolton
It was the unanimous opinion of the three lawyers in the city’s legal department that this ordinance would
be constitutional if adopted.
