Board of Aldermen — 3/22/16 Page 16
before that. It makes things easier on code. It doesn’t take as much of our legal resources.
The one thing that is comforting, | think, is that nobody has either expressed either publicly or privately to me or
my colleague’s discontent with the way code enforcement conducts their business. To address the present
moment and where we are now, | think everybody understands that they act professionally and reasonably.
We have to say, is there a fear going forward that may change? Of course there’s always a danger that a
government could be turned on its head, but there’s very specific training put in place so that reasonableness
is part of the training. Should the code enforcement ever get to the point where they become sort of the whip-
arm of government instead of something which is trying to do which | think most everybody out here does
normally that’s when we would come in and make a change necessary to rein them in. As I’ve said publicly,
our goal here is not to do something negative to landlords. In fact, | believe my colleagues can bear this out in
my committee, we’ve actively solicited input from city landlords and we’ve been unsuccessful in getting
anybody to talk to us.
I’m addressing the specific issues that people may have difference of opinion with, but let me go through the
various elements. Again, nothing has changed in the existing procedure. | actually would understand more of
the consternation should the legislation change what exists now. Some remarks were made about restaurants
owners aren’t here because they don’t know. In fact, | used to own seven restaurants and just sold them last
year. | am very familiar with conforming to health codes. If somebody had changed the administrative
procedure for fines for my restaurants, it wouldn’t have matter because I’m not a willful violated. | believe
almost everybody here, if not everybody in this audience, are now willful violators. | think you are all good
people trying to do the right thing. In fact, | think most people have said that they don’t have a problem with
code. Code’s first step is to say a complaint was made. A call is typically made to the landlord to get that
resolved. If they don’t hear back from either the tenant or the landlord within 15 days then they will go out and
investigate it at which point if it looks like progress is being made, and again good faith attempts are being
made to solve problems, everybody knows that fixing a roof is not the same thing as fixing a toilet. | believe
that code has acted that way. If they are going out there and seeing a good faith attempt to change thing, then
they are not going to even issue a warning. It is if they show up there and there’s clearly no good faith attempt
to do anything. At that point a warning is issued. Now the clock starts to click for a timeline to begin the good
faith resolution of the problem. It’s only at that point that we get to the differentiation between what exists now
and what we’re trying to achieve. If beyond that there is still a landlord that does not wish to resolve the
problem which was legitimately pointed out by code, now we go to court. What we want to do is not to go to
court. We want to issue a fine on a simple schedule. That’s what is going on here, plain and simple.
| understand that the legislation looks lengthy and it may be difficult to that kernel of things, and | apologize.
Legislation sometimes has to be written that way. | know there was a meeting that was help a few Thursdays
ago. | believe at the library by a bunch of landlords. | wish that either myself or some of my other colleagues
had been notified of that so we could have gone and probably helped you better understand that prior to even
the last public hearing. It’s not our intention to do things under the rug. We have a certain way that we
publicize the way legislation is introduced. This is really no different than any. In fact this got quite a bit of
front page coverage and most legislation doesn’t. If you actually look at what this is doing, the actually nugget
of what is going on here, there’s really not a change. Again, | don’t believe that anybody in this audience is
conducting their business as a willful offender because that is the only reason by which it would affect your
income stream. It’s not going to change anything. The responsibilities for tenants, if they tenants destroy
things, code already is aware of that. In fact, | had discussions with code. You can look on the city’s GIS
system and see violations. You can see certain properties, and it looks like they have a lot of violations. If you
ask code, they are aware of which ones are due to tenant issues and are not landlords. They will tell you that.
They are quite aware of that. They have a pretty long history of being reasonable. There’s no expectation that
will change.
As far as the timing goes, ten days or less, | believe Ms. Marchant was very explicit in not putting that in the
legislation because different situations requires different timeframes. A roof, for example, clearly is going to
take some time. If you have a boiler situation where parts are on order, it’s unreasonable to expect that
somebody making a good faith attempt is going to get fined because a part is not available. Code has never
acted that way, nor would we, as aldermen, ever wish to have legislation that would allow that to occur. If that
