December 3, 2013

 

The Board of Commissioners of the City of Lawrence met in regular session at 6:35 p.m., in the City Commission Chambers in City Hall with Mayor Dever presiding and members Amyx, Farmer, Riordan and Schumm present.  

A.        RECOGNITION/PROCLAMATION/PRESENTATION 

 

B.        CONSENT AGENDA

It was moved by Amyx, seconded by Schumm, to approve the consent agenda as below. Motion carried unanimously.

1.         Approved City Commission meeting minutes from 11/19/13.

 

2.         Received minutes from various boards and commissions:

 

Cultural District Task Force meetings of 10/28/13 and 11/06/13

Contractor Licensing Board meeting of 09/19/13

Homeless Issues Advisory Committee meeting of 10/08/13

Mental Health Board meeting of 10/29/13

Traffic Safety Commission meeting of 11/04/13

 

3.         Approved claims to 135 vendors in the amount of $1,421,199.08 and payroll from November 17 to November 30, 2013 in the amount of $1,975,577.87.

 

4.         Bid and purchase items:

 

a)         Awarded the bid for the lease of one Ford Explorer, current model year, and all-wheel drive pursuit rated equipped with special police package on a three (3) year lease from Shawnee Mission Ford in the amount of $10,388.26 per year, or a total of $31,164.78.

 

5.         Adopted on second and final reading, the following ordinances:

 

a)         Ordinance No. 8926, repealing Ordinance No. 8285 (annexation) and Ordinance No. 8350 (rezoning), for the 155 acre tract, near K-10 and N 1800 road intersection. Ordinance No. 8926 conformed the City’s ordinances to the appellate court decisions invalidating the earlier annexation and rezoning ordinances

b)         Ordinance No. 8940, removing redundant inspection requirements related to Cereal Malt Beverage licenses.

 

c)         Ordinance No. 8942, permitting raptors to be owned within City limits.

 

d)         Ordinance No. 8943, condemning certain property interests as authorized by Resolution No. 7050 required for the 23rd Street and Iowa intersection improvement project.

 

6.         Approved rezoning, Z-13-00401, approximately 1.95 acres from IG (General Industrial) District to CS (Strip Commercial) District, located at 1360, 1380, 1400, and 1410 N. 3rd St. Submitted by Colliers International, for Evenshar, LLC., property owner of record. Adopted on first reading, Ordinance No. 8944, to rezone (Z-13-00401) approximately 1.95 acres from IG (General Industrial) District to CS (Strip Commercial) District, located at 1360, 1380, 1400, and 1410 N. 3rd St. (PC Item 1; approved 9-0 on 11/18/13)

 

7.         Approved annexation, A-13-00291, of approximately 10.684 acres, located at 1338 E 1600 Road. Submitted by Grob Engineering Services, LLC., for Going South, LLC., property owner of record. Adopted on first reading, Ordinance No. 8945, to annex (A-13-00291) approximately 10.684 acres, located at 1338 E 1600 Road. (PC Item 2A; approved 8-0-1 on 11/18/13)

 

8.         Approved rezoning, Z-13-00290, approximately 10.684 acres from County A (Agricultural) District to RM15 (Multi-Dwelling Residential) District, located at 1338 E 1600 Road. Submitted by Grob Engineering Services, LLC., for Going South, LLC., property owner of record. Adopted on first reading, Ordinance No. 8946, to rezone (Z-13-00291) approximately 10.684 acres from County A (Agricultural) District to RM15 (Multi-Dwelling Residential) District, located at 1338 E 1600 Road. (PC Item 2B; approved 8-0-1 on 11/18/13)

 

9.         Accepted dedications and vacation of easements and rights-of-way associated with Final Plat, PF-13-00428, for 9 Del Lofts Addition, a 1 lot subdivision of approximately 1.3 acres, located at 900 Delaware Street. Submitted by Bartlett & West Inc. for Provident Family, LP, property owner of record.

 

10.       Concurred with the following recommendations of the Traffic Safety Commission:

 

a)         Approved extending the test period for resident parking only on Edgehill Road for 90 days (TSC item #2; approved 8-0 on 11/4//13).

 

b)         Established No Parking 7am–6pm Monday–Friday along the south side of Overland Drive from Champion Lane and provide sufficient sight distance where appropriate, east 1,225 feet and adopt on first reading Ordinance No. 8947, establishing the No Parking if appropriate (TSC item #3; approved 8-0 on 11/4/13).

 

c)         Denied the request to construct a Traffic Signal at the intersection of Bob Billings Parkway and Stone Meadows Drive (TSC item #4; denied 8-0 on 11/4/13).

 

d)         Approved Traffic Calming on Vermont Street between 21st Street and 23rd Street (TSC item #5; approved 8-0 on 11/4/13). Funding is not currently available for construction of these traffic calming devices.

 

e)         Approved Traffic Calming on Lawrence Avenue between 27th Street and 31st Street (TSC item #7; approved 8-0 on 11/4/13). Funding is not currently available for construction of these traffic calming devices.

 

11.       Authorized the Mayor to execute City/State Agreement No. 272-13 with the Kansas Department of Transportation for inspection services for the 31st Street, Haskell Avenue to O’Connell Road street, storm sewer, and waterline improvements.

 

12.       Authorized the Mayor to execute a loan agreement between the City of Lawrence and Lawrence Community Shelter in the amount of $725,000 plus interest.

 

13.       Authorized the Mayor to sign a Subordination Agreement for Diane M. Bucia Trybom, 333 Johnson Ave.

 

C.           CITY MANAGER’S REPORT:

David Corliss, City Manager, presented the report.

Farmer said he thought it was important to point out when City employees were going above and beyond their daily jobs.  He said Just Foods was approached by Duane LaFrenz and Cassandra Ford from the Solid Waste Division about a toy and food drive that they wanted to do before the holidays in conjunction with picking up yard trimmings which was to pick up non-perishable food items and toys.  He said it was tremendous to be part of an organization with innovative people that find innovative ways to give to this community.

LaFrenz said staff collected 65 toys which would give 21 kids in this community a Christmas.  He said they also collected 323 pounds of food which was equivalent to $530.  This was an employee driven program and encouraged everyone to at least put out one can which would make a tremendous difference in this community.  He thanked City Management for backing up their idea 110 percent.

D. REGULAR AGENDA ITEMS:

 

1.         Received presentation of Community Health Assessment by Community Health Plan Steering Committee.

 

Maley Wilkins, representing the Lawrence/Douglas County Health Board, said their board appreciated the opportunity to introduce everyone to their community health plan. There were major challenges to health and it was a reality in this community and citizens.  Many citizens have more than one chronic health condition. Social and environmental factors such as housing, education and employment impact health as well.  She said the community had to be proactive in order to reduce or reverse this declining health trend.  Changing the health care system just wasn’t enough to create a healthier community and it had to be more robust than just the health care system.  The point was that everyone had to be invested and committed to making a community health lens that everyone could look through and make decisions on.  She said for all of the decision makers in the community, all the decisions made in some way shape or form could be traced back to health.  It was an important issue and was one that needed to be brought to the forefront for all decision making.  In order to be proactive everyone needed to look up stream and look at the determining factors of health and come together on how to address those factors and concerns.  The health board thought it was really critical that the Health Department be an integral part of the community dialogue about the issues impacting health in Lawrence and Douglas County and how they could most effectively address those concerns as a community.  She said in December of 2011, they convened a steering committee to help undertake a community wide health assessment.  She said it included a broad base effort to identify the most important health issues in the community based on this group.  The Health Department collaborated with the KU work group on community health and development and with guidance from the steering committee those groups developed and implemented a broad array of assessment tools.  She said over 1500 participants, a number of those participants community members participated in surveys, focus groups, and interviews.  It was really in depth and broad perspective to look at those issues.  Out of that information that information that was collected through the health plan, they developed 5 priority areas that eventually formed the nucleus of the community health plan. Those 5 priority areas were:

1.         Access to health foods

2.         Access to health care services

3.         Awareness of and access to mental health services

4.         Physical activity

5.         Poverty and employment        

In the summer of 2002, community leaders were identified by the steering committee and asked to convene work groups around those 5 priorities and their goal was to develop goals and objectives and identify community based strategies to impact those 5 areas.  That work was completed in early in 2013.  Staff at the Health Department and the KU work group with oversight from the steering committee took the work of those groups and combined it into one plan.  Erika Dvorske, who was a steering committee member and also the head of the Poverty and Jobs Group would discuss the work that went into crafting that plan. 

Erika Dvorske, steering committee member and head of the Poverty and Jobs Group, said her day job was with the United Way of Douglas County. She said what it got down was to ensure that people in this community had jobs and were moving out of poverty or not falling into poverty.  She said why she thought the plan was relevant to the City Commission was that it could help the Commission do the critical work that they were focused on doing.  By using both the data and the framework that had been assembled through the many hours and people that had been involved, they could justify, substantiate and advance the overall well-being of the community.  She said it seemed like a very reasonable and exciting thing to do.  She would give the example that if the Commission directed the Social Services Advisory Board, which she currently served on, to use this framework for outside agency funding which would help direct precious resources to services that were in fact, in enhancing and strengthening the health of the community, around physical activity, access to health foods, access to health services, access to mental health services, and addressing one of the things that they identified as a root cause, which was poverty.  Some of the conclusions they reached in their process and discussion were trying to understand and define how they could make it more straight forward for people to get and sustain employment and how could they make jobs a critical factor in addressing issues of poverty.  One of the things that was really important to engage in a conversation about, was how did priorities like economic development and enhancing job opportunities, and access to health service all tie together and the plan gave them a framework to do that. In aspiration of improving the community’s health was something that everyone shared.  It was really only possible if they started thinking in terms of not necessarily what hats they wore, whether it was a social service hat, a business hat or a public sector hat, but how they could work in alignment and by sharing the framework they could in fact work in better alignment.

Dan Partridge, Director of Lawrence/Douglas County Health Department, said based upon national measures of health, he was confident in saying that tens of thousands of adults in Lawrence suffer from one or more chronic medical conditions and Lawrence spent hundreds of millions of dollars, each year, on health care to treat preventable conditions. This community health plan was built not only upon the process that was discussed, but also the guiding principle at where people live, learn, work and play matter to people’s health.  Public health research indicated that a person’s zip code was a more important determent of our health than our genetic code.  They had an obligation to their selves and neighbors to do what they could to assure that where they lived, learn, work and play contributed to a higher level of wellness.  This plan was this community’s attempt to align and direct efforts across the public and private sectors to achieve their vision of a healthier Douglas County.  He said he respectfully asked that the City Commission formerly accept this community health plan as a guiding document for the City of Lawrence.

Steve Fawcett said he had never seen as broad as table set for engagement and planning that could make a big difference in this community.  He said they were respectfully asking the City Commission to take this substantive document for grounding the work and investments that happen and use it as a guide for decision making. 

Farmer said this was a tremendous process and there was a wide array of people who cared about those issues and gave input.  He said this was an exciting thing that they had a community that cared enough about its health of this community.  He said those folks were not subject matter experts sitting around a table trying to come up with various things that they thought were the biggest issues.  He said these were things straight out of the mouths of people in this community. He said he fully supported this report and its use as a guiding document for the community.   He said if they didn’t have a direction that they were going he was told that if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time. He said they needed to know what they were aiming for in relationship to those 5 areas and that way, as policy makers, as they made those decision they were working within a framework of many months of public input and a whole lot of work and dedication by so many people.      

Riordan said as a physician he thought it was extremely important that they had accessibility and Lawrence’s was well represented, much more so than other cities, especially Overland Park and Topeka, with physicians taking Medicaid.  He said he wanted to comment on two items.  The first item was Partridge’s comment about where someone lived being more important determent of someone’s health.  The reason was because where a person lived and how active and accessibility to walking on sidewalks and bike paths, would tell someone whether they would be overweight or not.  The insurance company could predict who would be overweight based on where a person lived and their zip code.  In Lawrence at previous meetings, they were encouraging activity and trying to get a ring around the city for bicycles and include places for people to walk.  The other aspect was healthy foods, the “Just Foods” concept of not just giving out food, but educating people on food and what’s good and what’s healthy.  He said there were a significant amount of children he sees in his office that were overweight.  Very few people realize that if you drink 12 ounces of juice a day, a person would gain 12 pounds a year.  If drinking 12 ounces of pop every day, a person would gain 12 pounds a year.  If taking one small hamburger, one small fry and one small pop every day, a person would gain 45 pounds a year.  He said there was a lot of education that had to be done and thought this group was fantastic. He said this City did very many things to protect its citizens, educate it citizens and provide a quality of life.  He said this was a good example.

Dever said the City Commission appreciated the work of this steering committee and preparation of this health plan.  He said it was not easy to do this type of work, but the work product spoke for itself.  He said he appreciated Farmer participating and all those members of this community that helped make this happen.

The City Commission received the presentation.

2.         Considered adopting on first reading, Ordinance No. 8840, expanding the rental licensing program to all rental units in the city with certain exceptions noted.

 

Scott McCullough, Planning and Development Services Director, presented the staff report.

Mayor Dever called for public comment.

Brandy Sutton said she wanted to address some issues when she read over the latest draft of this ordinance. She said there had been a lot of changes since the study session which were:

Chapter 6-1310(b) original read that inspections were 10% rounded up to the next whole number not to exceed 15 units.  That 15 units had been struck and now it was 10% of all units and allowed for an additional 10% of all units to be inspected if the inspector felt there had been a violation made.  Originally, in earlier study sessions it had been agreed that there would be a limit of 15%, trying not to subject the complex to additional burden.

Chapter 6-1311(b) stated that any licensee that refused consent shall be charged an administrative fee of $25 per dwelling.  Obviously, they had concerns that if the tenant actually refused consent that the landlord not be penalized for the City having to seek an administrative search warrant. 

Chapter 6-1323, concerned regulations that allowed the City Manager to promulgate reasonable administrative regulations.  This was extremely concerning because a majority of this program that had been discussed in study sessions where they would have an administrative procedure that would handle this and there would be not public input to that if it was promulgated by the City Manager and the transparency was concerning. 

Chapter 6-1313 stated that code officials shall first make attempt to contact with the occupant and present proper credentials and request entry.  She said that was not presented at the study sessions. What had been presented at the study sessions was that the landlord would be contacted and advised of the units that would be inspected and that the landlord would need to have a consent form, signed by tenants and presented back to the inspectors. She said this was extremely concerning and probably didn’t pass the Kamara test that set out the rules and reasonableness of those inspections.  She said they would basically be making the landlord an agent of the State and asking the landlord to do actions of a government official. Obviously, the landlords she represented were extremely concerned about the liability for this and were also concerned that the actual consent form would be void. If the tenant refused to sign the consent, the landlords not going to lease to them or the landlord would say the tenant was in violation of the lease.  This was a coercive situation not actually allowing a tenant to voluntarily consent, but being forced to consent.  Another issue they had with the consent forms was that they had a large foreign student population and asked if the forms would be provided in multiple languages.  She asked what they would do to address religious concerns because they had a large Muslim student population who would not permit an inspector or other persons to be in their unit without a head of household being present.  The consent forms also asked for picture or video to be taken of a violation.  She knew she personally dealt with situations where they went into hoarder units.  If they were taking pictures of this and it became part of the public record that became available for the public to review and hoarding was a mental condition.  The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013 specifically lists hoarding disorder as a mental condition.  She said they were going to be possibly exposing someone’s mental health situation to a public records request. 

Chapter 6-1316(b) was an entirely new section, giving tenants notice of the violation and asked if the landlord would also be notified in this situations, what the consequences were if the tenant fails to remediate, how this would be rectified with Chapter 6-1316(a) which was the appeal timeframes, how they were going to reconcile those two things when looking at the regulations which required the landlord to remediate within 30 days.  If they were giving the tenant 30 days would the landlord be given another 30 days on top of that if the tenant didn’t rectify the situation. 

She said under major violations they had occupancy violation and she wasn’t sure how this was the landlords fault if the landlord rented to 3 people, had a lease with 3 people and there were 5 people living at that location.  The landlord had no way of knowing this and the inspector finds it and all of a sudden the landlord was losing incentives because of the tenant’s actions.  She said she personally litigated cases where they had tried to evict tenants for this type of violation and it was impossible to prove that there was another person living at that same location.  She said what happened was they served the 1430 Notice required under the Landlord Tenant Act, re-inspect and the tenant indicated that that person was just staying there and 30 days later the boyfriend/girlfriend was back in the unit and they were back to the same process again.  She said unless they could get postal service to testify that an occupant was receiving mail or they happened to subpoena utility records that clearly showed an increase in utilities usages, it was tough and had not been successful in those scenarios. 

Another issue was that a major violation was considered required common shared path of egress blocked or obstructed.  Again, this was a tenant issue.  If a tenant puts a bicycle puts other things in front of the egress this was not the landlords fault for the egress being blocked and should not be considered a major violation.

Eric Hurt said he supported this ordinance and thought it would definitely help the quality of renting units in Lawrence.  He said he had discussion with a graduate student who was very smart and had been all around the country.  He said he had shown that student the list of the administrative regulations and the student was not aware that he had 5 actual violations with 1 major and 4 minor violations.  He said other people talked about privacy being an issue and he could see it being an issue, but the only thing that legally they were to make sure the tenants consent.  As long as tenants consent to their places being reviewed, giving those tenants advanced notification he didn’t see that as a problem.  To make sure the debate was going efficiently and effectively, they also needed to remember that this wasn’t them doing something totally different, but expanding what was actually already going on.  He said for about 9 years, they had reviewed over 2,000 units and there hadn’t been any problems with people getting incarcerated for illegal drugs.  He said this rental registration was a good thing and most of the complaints were about whether this registration was implemented correctly.            

Schumm asked if Hurt was with any organization from KU.

Hurt said he was the Government Relations Director for Student Senate and wasn’t an employee that represented the University of Kansas, but was hired and elected by the student body.

Schumm asked if the student senate discuss rental registration.

Hurt said they had discussed this issue as an executive staff, but hadn’t drafted any type of resolutions because they didn’t know when they would bring this to a vote. 

Russell Livingston said he urged the City Commission to table this ordinance in its present form.  In the first place the ordinance was incomplete.  As it stood now, city staff would fill in the holes after the ordinance was passed and the public would have no further input.  Passing an incomplete ordinance was undemocratic.  The public had a right and a duty to examine and comment on this ordinance before adoption.  Secondly, the city was pushing to expand a program that its own city auditors reported being inefficient in 2012.  He said why citizens should take the risk that the City’s expanded program would function more efficiently than the current program.  Most shocking of all was the City’s demand that the City’s enforcement agents be allowed into the homes of Lawrence citizens with digital video and audio recording equipment without a warrant.  The consent waiver attached to the new rental registration form coerced landlords and their tenants to sign a document that compromises the tenants 4th amendment rights.  As a long-time Lawrence landlord, he was not comfortable asking his tenants to do that.  The City of Manhattan tried this in 2011 and it went very wrong.  The study session held at City Hall last month, City staff provided the City Commission with a document from Manhattan, Kansas, building inspectors concerning their inspection program.  The Manhattan program was repealed after 4 months due mostly to citizen’s arrests. Two examples were that citations were issued for what Manhattan inspectors described as hoarding, a disabling form of obsessive, compulsive mental illness, clearly a discriminatory violation of basic civil rights.  He said five citizens were arrested and sentenced to a 15 day jail term for damaged property and it was clearly, a civil matter, not a public responsibility. A Manhattan building official was quoted in the same document stated “We, Manhattan Inspectors had referred a few addresses to the Riley County Police Department, in which we, the inspectors, observed suspected drugs and/or paraphernalia present during our inspection.  Early on in the program, we underwent training from the Riley County Police Department since we knew we might run into these situations.”  David Corliss, City Manager, City of Lawrence, Kansas was quoted in Sunday’s Journal World as not thinking that this would be a problem, yet Manhattan officials knew they might run into those situations.  Was Lawrence unique with the respect of young adults and their curiosity?  Would the Commission explain to the parent why their child was incarcerated or haunted by a criminal record?  In the same Journal World article, Corliss also stated, “I think there is an obligation that if inspectors see something that they believed was illegal, it was appropriate to talk to a supervisor about it.”  In this case the, the Codes Enforcement Supervisor was Brian Jimenez, a former Lawrence Police Officer trained in criminal investigations.  He said with so much at stake this ordinance should be thoroughly reworked out before it was passed, not after the fact and without public input.  It appeared that the primary purpose of this ordinance was to generate revenue for the City’s 2014 Budget and to increase the surveillance of citizens and not to address the concerns and realities of the rental housing market in Lawrence.  The City was pushing this ordinance under the vague banner of citizen’s life safety.  It seemed that an ordinance requiring city enforcement agents with video cameras to enter the homes of Lawrence citizens without cause was a serious threat to the life/safety of this community.

Candice Davis, Co-Chair of the Oread Residence Association, said for the last 5 years, the long-term residences in the Oread neighborhood had been working for a rental inspection ordinance.  They already had a rental inspection ordinance that had been in existence for 12 years.  If there were problems, she thought those problems would have come to the City Commission’s attention and been resolved.  She said the only reason they were promoting and excited about the possibility of this ordinance was because they lived in a neighborhood where they saw what happened too many of the rental units and they were absolutely unsafe.  If talking about zip codes and where people lived, she thought it was important to consider housing as well.  She said health and housing were important and as a public service in the City, they should be obligated to provide safe housing for everyone.  She said it was disgraceful what some of the landlords actually rent out.  She said she was a landlord, had two facilities, followed the codes, and welcome people to come inspect her houses, but they didn’t and only inspected houses in single-family neighborhoods which made no sense that it wasn’t a city wide program.  She said she didn’t have problems with her tenants and a lot of that had to do with her contact.  She went into her tenant’s home not to inspect, but to replace the furnace filters, fix washer/dryers, stoves and appliances, and could observe the condition of the home.  She said a lot of the stipulations were in the lease and she even had curfews and no keg parties.  She said she seriously doubted that any person that rented from her would have any trouble not signing an inspection notice.  Everyone was given notification for their safety.  She said she was totally behind this ordinance and the City had done a remarkable job in coming up with something that was outstanding.  She said people brought up Manhattan, Kansas, but happened to know that the City Commission changed at that time and it had a whole new group of people who wanted to do away with that ordinance and didn’t think they gave it enough time to properly evaluate the ordinance.  She said Lawrence was a progressive community and was something that should be done and be proud of the fact that they already made this happen.

Dan Dannenberg, 2702 University Drive, said he was representing himself and no other organization.  He said the City’s failure in the area of code enforcement and probably rental regulation was well documented.  He said they had the Oread neighborhood, the MagnaGro situation, 12th and Haskell situation, apartments in South Lawrence, the trailer park in North Lawrence, and the State of Kansas v. Lemesany incident where the violation of the tenants privacy was done by the landlord, but the City wasn’t interested in that and neither were the landlords.  He said they had a situation of radon gas, according to some hack scientist in the environmental protection agency of the federal government and the state health department was a known carcinogen, the second cause of lung cancer behind smoking and it was prevalent in this part of the country, yet they had a license physician on the Commission, and that hadn’t been brought up.  He said there were numerous considerations here and basically they had been asked about 4th Amendment rights. That was just a red herring and this could be done without unduly infringing on people’s right to privacy.  Those facilities, whether they were residential rental properties, or apartments, were businesses and they had impacts not only on their individual structure, but the entire neighborhood and that had to be considered.  He said he had the situation where a group of feral K.U. students liked to get together on the nights of KU basketball games and swill excessive quantities of alcoholic beverages and then midnight or thereafter, he got to listen to the students yelling down the sidewalk and getting in their cars and driving away.  He said it might be that the additional traffic driven by someone under the influence might not be a good thing.  He said they wouldn’t be present today talking about this if the landlords and non-resident property owners would own up to running their businesses like they should. They’ve always heard about how great the private sector is, but they wouldn’t be present, wouldn’t have a FDA, wouldn’t have a FAA, wouldn’t have the Kansas Corporation Commission, and they wouldn’t have all of those regulatory agencies if the private sector was being responsible.  This was instance where the private sector chose not to be responsible.  He said they had the issue of Code Enforcement Officers being afraid to do their jobs. They couldn’t be operating out of fear and had to be professionals and doing the job to protect the entire community.

Matt Hoy, Attorney representing the Lawrence Apartments Association, said their organization was comprised of community members that owned and operated apartment multi-family zoned properties.  The Lawrence Apartments Association had existed for slightly over 40 years and one of the major tenants and hallmarks of the Lawrence Apartments Association was providing safe and appropriate housing stock in this community.  The Lawrence Apartments Association encouraged strict compliance with City Code.  That should occur and an expanded rental registration and inspection program did not add any additional code protection for tenant’s safety.  All the codes already existed and should be enforced.  If community members and staff were aware of code violations, those should be prosecuted and not be allowed to stand.  If the goal was safe housing, if the goal was compliance with registration and inspection programs, then that registration program, all of the parameters of that needed to be clear so that those involved in the industry could comply with it.  If the Commission was going to enact an ordinance, but leave open what the regulations were, that was where the rubber met the road.  He asked how they could reasonably expect the housing stock of over half the community citizens to satisfy those regulations when those weren’t yet defined.  He said he simply submitted that before the City Commission enacted this program, that they make it fair and something that could be complied with from the outset by defining what the regulations would be that went with this program. He said as it stood now, it wasn’t defined and there were too many grey areas.  It wasn’t reasonable to expect that anyone could predict what those regulations would be and guess properly so that they could comply with those regulations as they might be later promulgated.

Farmer asked if the Lawrence Apartments Association has an inspection process for the apartment complexes that were a part of that group.

Hoy said no.  He said most of the members of the Lawrence Apartments Association already had their property inspected by lenders and by insurers on an annual basis.  Those inspections were performed for many of the same code concerns and safety concerns that this program would address.  In fact, it might be reasonable for a consideration to be given to properties like that, that were already inspected multiple times as to whether or not that type of inspection should satisfy any city requirement.

Farmer said Hoy mentioned that there were too many grey areas and asked Hoy to comment on a few of those grey areas.

Hoy said one of the major issues was how the tenant’s rights were going to be properly safe guarded and what the landlords role was in protecting those tenant’s rights.  Landlords were obligated already under the Kansas Residential Landlord Tenant Act, to safeguard the quiet possession of the unit that the tenant had rented from the landlord.  He said for the landlord to then go to the tenant in some way, and require that tenant to open up their home to inspection was arguably a violation of that landlord tenant act. He said clarification on how the inspections would apply for the tenants consent and whether or not the landlord had a responsibility to force that compliance as a significant grey area, for example.    

Schumm said there had been 12 to 15 meeting since they started this proposed rental registration.  He said he had been to every meeting whether it was a City Commission meeting, a study session, or informative meetings and somewhere along the line in the last couple of meetings they agreed with the apartment association not to start this until August of next year because that was the major transition point for people moving in, to allow for reworking the leases to accommodate this section of inspection.    He asked if Hoy was suggesting that that was not a good way to go.  He said he thought that was what the Lawrence landlords had asked the City Commission to do so that it would coordinate this activity.

Hoy said Schumm raised an important point about timing of inspection and perhaps even utilizing an inspection of a vacant unit as opposed to someone’s residence.  The opportunity to do that increased that turnover time that there might be vacant units, but to try to do that on a comprehensive basis across the city when there was so much significant turnover at the time, would be difficult.  The issue remained that they didn’t have a definition on what the administrative regulations would be at the point when the ordinance was enacted.  To try to obtain compliance from the apartment industry, he assumed was the City’s goal and was not to hopefully have violations.  If compliance was the goal, then clarity in what the requirements were seemed necessary. 

Betty Alderson said she had worked on the single-family home rental registration and had heard many of those same arguments, but it still came down that they were talking about seeing that people who rented units had a safe place in which to live.  She said many of the things that had been brought up were side issues and not the focus of the ordinance to provide safe housing for people who were renting. Many of the same arguments came up before.  She said the landlords had stood in the way every single step of the way and was sorry to say that publically.  She said they had wonderful landlords, but as any professional business not every one used the same standards of operation.  She said they began this meeting talking about health issues and if you didn’t have a safe place to live, it certainly wasn’t healthy and it affected how many times a person went to the doctor or don’t.  She said she and her husband came back to Lawrence in 1948 when he began working with Student Affairs, within 2 years, he had a call from the Chancellor to go to see what he could do for a family that had lost a child in a rental unit from carbon monoxide poisoning from an unvented space heater that could have been prevented that if, in those olden days, they had some kind of an inspection to see if units were safe.  The violations that were uncovered were purely health and safety issues and fire hazards.  As a society they ought to be responsible for fellow citizens to make sure that everyone had a safe place.  If owning your own home and doing unsafe things, then that person would pay the consequences, but this was a commercial venture and people were collecting money from renters to provide housing and they had an obligation to have that property inspected so that it was safe for people to live in.  She said they lost sight of that when getting into all of those side issues.  This was not a new issue and the public had ample time to say whatever they wanted to and privately they had been saying for years that they needed to some way to make sure people had a safe place to live.

Matt Goff, Barber Emerson Law Firm, said he was present to touch upon some of the concerns that he had about tenants and their expectation of privacy.  If they were truly trying to protect the tens of thousands of people in this City that lived in a place that they didn’t own, they needed to make sure that the ordinance actually protected those people and that didn’t just mean searching for major and minor violations, but also meant establishing their trust and enabled them to know that the inspections would be conducted in a manner that was respectful of their privacy and entitled to by right.  If the true scope of the program was to protect and enforce their current existing life safety ordinance then the following two suggestions should be very easy and natural to implement.

1.         The ordinance should be revised to prioritize the inspection of those units that were vacant, because a vacant unit could be inspected from top to bottom and at no time would they ever interfere with an occupant in that house.  It was a more thorough inspection, faster and didn’t require anyone’s consent other than the landlords. The new ordinance when it eliminated the cap of 15 units per property was actually bad for tenants because it meant more occupied units would be inspected.  Every time a code enforcement officer walked through the doorway of an occupied unit, there was a risk for delay in the case of an administrative warrant, a possible 4th Amendment violation depending on how the inspection was implemented and in almost every instance was inefficient because there was stuff on the floor and things that couldn’t be looked at such as opening drawers.  To the extent that they could, he implored the City Commission to revise the ordinance to inspect vacant units.  If they could accomplish their inspection quota by doing that then the system had great potential of being both efficient and accomplishing all of the life safety objectives that this ordinance purports to protect.                                         

2.         All of the regulations, protocols, and inspection forms needed to be made available for public consumption.  The current draft of the ordinance and the incomplete administrative regulations that they had, came out on Thanksgiving Eve and there hadn’t been a lot of time to chew on this draft.  He said this was an ordinance that really required the cooperation of tenants and landlords and had to instill on both tenants and landlords, a feeling that this would work. He said he could consent to this because it was limited in scope and knew the code enforcement officer might ask him this, but won’t ask him something else and wouldn’t look through his drawer. He said he would know when they were coming and how much notice he would have before the inspection occurred.  None of those materials were available and it was the intent of everyone to be as accommodating as possible, but it needed to be writing and in the club houses of all of the apartment complexes in town so that tenants could take it home, look at it and show their parents. He said until those regulations were made public, there was a possibility that the ordinance would instill a lot of distrust and discord.  If it went forward without the cooperation of tenants who must give consent of some kind, even if it was in writing, it could be revoked verbally when the inspector showed up at the door. He said until they saw all that stuff and give everyone an opportunity to look at it, there were so many problems that that faced all of which could be avoided.  None of the suggestion he had made had any downsides. There was no problem of delay and would push the inspection off for a year anyway.  He said this was a big deal and touched upon the majority of the residences in town and ought to take the time to make sure it was done right.       

Ross Zuppie said he had been both a landlord and a renter.  He said he didn’t see how they could enforce this ordinance.  He said some of the people that owned rental homes, lived in Hawaii. 

Marci Francisco said she and her husband had been landlords since around 1990.  She said they had properties that were both in the single family areas that had come under inspection and some properties in multi-family that had not.  She appreciated what that City had done in managing this program in the single-family neighborhood and had been very transparent to them.  She said she had been given notice and staff had been good about working with them if there was a problem.  She said a couple of her properties were multi-family and were 4-plexes which would be different from an apartment complex, but there was no inspection from either the insurance or the lender. They had some situations where they had been replacing a water heater and the new code asked for inspection and was not really a different situation with the tenants from having an inspector come in.  She said they were given notice because they knew that they had to get the water heat replaced, but that was a city inspector that would come in and there hadn’t been any concerns with privacy.  She said she didn’t see this situation as totally different from others where inspectors come in to a tenant’s property especially with the new plan that it could be once every 3 years or 6 years.  She said they really weren’t talking about a great number of intrusions upon tenant privacy.  Certainly they wanted to keep their property as well as they could, but it was always good to have a gentle nudge sometime and she thanked the City.

Schumm asked if Francisco’s single family homes were inspected.                                       

Francisco said yes.  One of the homes was Section 8 and for a number of years didn’t have an inspection.

Schumm asked if Francisco had any concerns from those tenants about privacy with and inspector coming to their houses.  He asked if she had any situation where at the last moment the tenant didn’t want the inspector in their house.

Francisco said they had not.  There were a lot of good landlords and good tenants in the community.  She said their tenants were comfortable with them coming into their homes if a repair needed to be made.  The most common concern was “please, don’t let the cat out.” 

Schumm said with Francisco’s single family homes that were inspected now, he asked if that was an annual inspection.

Francisco said it was once every three years.  She said they pay the fee annually and the inspection was every 3 years.

Schumm asked if the violations were broken down into major and minor violations.

Francisco said no and that was a better thing to take up with inspectors.  She said they were just given a list and had 30 days to get the problem fixed.  She said it was operated well and had to make some repairs.  Occasionally, they had found things that they hadn’t been aware of and had changed, but it was helpful to have that list.  Essentially, they had gone through the apartment with the list required by the Tenant Landlord Act when someone moved in and now they have that list that the City was going to be looking for.

Riordan asked Francisco that when she renewed her insurance every year, did someone inspect their property from the insurance company.

Francisco said no.

Riordan asked if the insurance company ever inspected.

Francisco said initially.

Riordan asked how many years ago was that inspection.

Francisco said 15 years ago.

Paulette Teague, Tower Properties, said every one of her properties, from Hutton Farms to Tuckaway and the smaller properties did get inspected every year from appraisers and the mortgage companies.  They did 5% of the vacant and 10% to 15% or the occupancy.           

Schumm asked if Teague had any problems with the occupied units with tenants allowing her in and allowing for an inspection.

Teague said the questions were pets and most tenants want to take off work to be present during the inspection.

Schumm asked if anyone indicated that the inspector could not come in.

Teague said no.

Schumm said he was trying to gage the resentment or resistance from tenants.  He said they were being shown a scenario of alienating people.

Teague said there were times when tenants would just say no and they let the mortgage company know and the mortgage company would give them 3 more tenants to choose from.   

Schumm said in general it wasn’t a big deal.

Teague said they usually had to talk their tenants into it.

Janet Gerstner said she lived for 10 years in the Oread Neighborhood and was active in the Neighborhood Association at that time.  She was very pleased about this ordinance expanding to all areas of the City and was something that had been badly needed. She said while she was a resident in the neighborhood, she went door to door to distribute neighborhood information and to talk with residents from time to time.  She said she was often extremely shocked about the condition of some of the rental units.  She said she was invited into some of those apartments and it was obvious that there were a lot of health and safety issues.  She said events that happened over the time that she lived in the Oread neighborhood, were of great concern. As an expansion of an existing program, it seemed like a good time to do this.  She there had been great thought going into this rental registration ordinance and there was much fine tuning and accommodation to try and make it as fair and reasonable for everyone as possible.  She said she was a landlord for over 10 years and this ordinance would have been something that she would have welcomed.  In discussing this issue with landlords that she personally knew, sometimes they didn’t know much about the program, but usually they had questions and as they had gone through they had always expressed support.  The general feeling she received from folks was that she was a good landlord and cared about her tenants and properties.  This would be something that she would support.  Lastly, she wanted to commend the City staff for all their hard work.  She also wanted to thank the City Commissioners because sometimes doing something that’s not always the most popular with everyone was a difficult thing to do, but when it was the right thing to do and there was both health and safety at stake that was the sign of true leaders and true integrity. 

Riordan asked if staff could walk him through what happened if someone refused to sign and was it going to be required to have a signature from every person that rented in this City.            

Scott McCullough, Planning and Development Services Director, said typically what staff imagined being very similar to their existing program was that as the inspection date approached, staff would make contact with the licensee to start that coordination about getting an inspection date and time coordinated.  He said there were very cooperative landlords in the current program where a form was provided and the landlord signed and given back to staff so that they had a prepared packet for inspection.  He said he understood that staff would need consent from one of the tenants at a minimum and then the inspection was completed.  Typically, the owner and/or tenant were present to accompany the inspector.  There had been cases where staff didn’t receive consent and staff tried to accommodate the will of the tenant.  He said for example, if it was close to their move out date, staff would wait and try to schedule something to accommodate their schedule.  If that wasn’t feasible then they always have the ability to seek an administrative search warrant to help staff fulfill the program.

Riordan asked if the City would not require that they had permission to inspect every unit.

McCullough said if there were multiple units, they only need the consent from the units that they were scheduled to inspect that year.  He said he had talked to Goff about his idea regarding multi-unit complex and there were vacancies that had not been inspected then it made good sense to inspect those units because it was more efficient for staff and the landlord and would get staff the same results.  He said staff could commit to making that part of their administrative regulations as a policy.  

    Riordan said he thought that was a good comment and asked if it would it be possible to only inspect empty units.

McCullough said it could be possible if the situation presented itself in that way.  Staff didn’t want to do the same units in the next inspection cycle, but different units.

Riordan said he didn’t remember discussing that they remove the cap and asked why that was done.

Randy Larkin, Senior Assistant Attorney said he believed that was a misapprehension on staff’s part.  He said it was originally going to be 10% of the premises and then it was expanded out to 10% of all properties of one owner.  He said staff thought it would be a flat 10% and could always add in the 15% cap if that was the desire of the Commission.  

Riordan said there was a $25 fee if the licensee didn’t show up.  He said let’s say something happened and it was the fault of the tenant rather than the licensee.  He asked if it would be the licensee that would receive the $25 late fee.

Larkin said there would be no penalty to the licensee.  The tenant had the absolute right to refuse entry.  He said if staff didn’t have consent then staff would see an administrative warrant.  Again, if the tenant refused entry, that would not be held against the licensee.

Amyx asked if McCullough had the inspection form that the inspectors would use.

McCullough said no.

Amyx asked if those forms were available to any member of the public.

McCullough said the current form was available, but staff needed to amend that form. He said staff did have a draft at one of their meetings, but again staff would be flexible.  He said he had personally been talking to stakeholder about how different forms would look, the language and the message it conveyed.  He said staff understood that they needed to be flexible.  He said he did have the consent form, but did not have the check list.

Amyx asked if staff was going to revise the current inspection check list, even in the RS district.

McCullough said the check list in concept was revised due to the major/minor violations so that it was easier for staff to gage what was major and what was minor.  Right now staff had a check list that didn’t distinguish because there was no distinction in the current program.  If there was a violation of code, it was simply a violation of code and would need to correct it in the timeframe established.  The forms would obviously need to change to account for the major/minor violations. 

Schumm said that was part of the evolutionary process because there was another conciliatory part from the Commission to the major apartment owners in that if there were very minor issues, staff didn’t want to ding them so bad that it made it very difficult.  He said they setup the major/minor and out of that the bonus system grew to only once every 6 years, if they had 5 or less minor violations.  He said that was all developed since the single family dwelling inspections.

McCullough said correct.

Riordan said Sutton brought up several other issues which were important.  He asked if there were any concerns about religious beliefs.  As a physician in a hospital, there were certain rooms that he would not go into until the women had a chance to be appropriately attired and prepared.  He asked how the City could be courteous to its citizens so that staff didn’t do anything that would transgress people’s thoughts and beliefs.

McCullough said staff was bound to have any number of issues or personal desires on certain issues about holidays and scheduling inspections.  Staff accommodated those issues today.  There was some expectation that even in that context, individuals would need to be held accountable to governmental programs and staff would accommodate that to the best of their ability.  Just as staff did today, if someone was impaired physically or mentally and needed accommodations, staff would accommodate those persons in those regards like they did with any number of programs that were in operation today.

Riordan said when the tenant had a minor problem that should be solved within a certain period of time and it wasn’t, he asked what would happen.

McCullough said one of the distinctions that staff was proposing was to clarify that they would hold tenant accountable for tenant base violations.  It wouldn’t count toward the licensee or within the program.  It could be appealed, but wouldn’t hold the landlord accountable.  Staff would site the violation and then the tenant would have an opportunity to appeal to the City’s Building Code Advisory Board and it would play itself out just like it would if it was the landlord being cited. He said after that, staff had the ability to prosecute in Municipal Court as well.

Riordan said if staff thought there were excessive people living in a unit, he asked how the city would handle that violation, independent of the rental inspection.

McCullough said it was a violation of the Development Code and was an occupancy violation and staff worked to investigate first.  He said there was an alleged violation, staff would investigate that and sometimes it would take time in that particular case because staff had reported to the Commission what a challenge over occupancy issues were.  He said sometimes over occupancy was very apparent such as a tenant testifying against tenants and landlords.  He said staff usually was involved with over occupancy when there was some sort of dispute between tenants or tenant/landlord and the evidence becomes pretty readily apparent to staff.  He said staff would then take their normal means of prosecuting that violation through the City’s system.

Riordan asked how that had worked out.

McCullough said staff had some success.  He said there had been several over occupancy cases and for the most part had some good success.     

Riordan said how the videos and pictures would be handled and asked if there would be any privacy issues.

McCullough said the value of taking the photos was to document violations. He said if staff was looking at wood rot on the inside or outside of a window, it would be right at the frame of the window and very rarely would it be an entire room or wouldn’t have reason to photo a desk.  He said staff wouldn’t go in and necessarily video tape as they were walking through a structure, unless it was in a hoarding condition or something unsanitary and not safe.  It did become part of the public record, but usually this close in violation specific and it helped the tenant because they would provide staff with a photo of the repair.

Larkin said there would be not taking of cameras or recording equipment without the consent of the tenant.  If they refuse to have that done, then there would be no cameras. The use of cameras would be to document in case there were further proceedings necessary and to see if they could remediate the problem.

Riordan said several people referred to hoarding.  He said hoarding was very dangerous and led to fires and unsafe/unsanitary conditions.  He asked how staff would handle that situation.

McCullough said most often for staff hoarding was a product of exterior yard violations. It was keeping trash, debris and junk piles in the yards.  The code didn’t speak to hoarding in the interior unless it was blocking egress or blocking an airway of ventilation.  Interior wise it was not necessarily something that staff would look for as a code violation.  It presented itself mostly when getting to the exterior of properties.

Riordan said his biggest concern was the City looking for things that would be illegal.  He asked how the City would assure the public that the police wouldn’t come and ask for an inspection on a particular unit to take pictures and prosecute.  He said he didn’t think the City would do that, but how would he assure the public that that wouldn’t occur and that was not the City’s mission.

McCullough said staff had attempted to frame that in the memo presented to the City Commission and look at the track record.  In the twelve years of the City’s program they had not prosecuted anyone for any alleged illegal activity outside of the property maintenance code issues. To the contrary it was usually reverse and it was usually that the police or fire department had been to a scene for some event that occurred and noted such conditions that were unsanitary conditions and call and refer it to Development Services staff.  He said sometimes that resulted in condemning property and help find housing for someone.  He said they also tried to report that they would have an obligation to perhaps report something staff found illegal, but weren’t going in looking for those items.  He said with the notice staff would provide to tenants there was certainly that element that the tenant had notice that staff was coming to do an inspection for the rental program.

Toni Wheeler, City Attorney, said she had prepared a number of the administrative warrants that the City obtained back in 2002 when staff conducted inspections under the existing program.  The affidavit staff prepared and had to present to a District Court Judge identified who was going in and for what purpose.  They identify that it was Code Enforcement Staff and provide what types of items that staff would be looking for and what equipment that would be taken in etc…  She said she was very doubtful that a Judge would ever approve a warrant that stated a Police Officer was going in to inspect, under this administrative warrant procedure, under the City’s housing program. The Judge weighed what would be appropriate in that situation.

Riordan said he didn’t think that would occur, but wanted to bring that up because there were multiple questions about that issue.  If someone was going to have their house inspected and hadn’t signed and the City had to obtain a warrant, he asked what kind of notification that tenant would have.

Wheeler said once there was an administrative warrant approved by judge they would have a certain amount of time in which to execute that warrant.  Once staff returned from the courts office and had that warrant then staff would contact the landlord and/or tenant and that they had established the date and time that staff would go through with the inspection.  The landlord and/or tenant had the option to see the warrant to see that it had been signed by the District Court Judge.

Riordan said staff would not be going in to a home for inspection, unannounced.

Schumm said it was hours or days after the administrative warrant was issued.

Wheeler said yes, but it was usually 72 to 96 hours.

Schumm said there was plenty of time for people to straighten things up if they had a problem.

Wheeler said yes.

Amyx asked if staff could discuss the grandfather part of this program.

McCullough said if structures were remodeled or constructed under any code of the City it would be recognized that they had met the code at the time and wouldn’t have to renovate.  The program wasn’t grandfathering in use which was a zoning issue.  What staff had proposed as an amendment to the property maintenance code had to do with the situations where it was unclear whether they had built to any code.  He said where staff didn’t have a record or couldn’t produce a record for staff review, it was readily apparent without a lot of research that the use was allowed.  If it was a 3 unit apartment complex in the RM District for example, but staff had no record of the attic unit being created.  What staff was offering as an amendment to the Property Maintenance Code, in lieu of requiring fire sprinklers was an alternative, but also minimum code that addressed the fire code value of minimum life/safety issues.  They would have the option to either sprinkle the structure or provide interconnected alarms, a good interior egress out of the structure and/or a good exterior egress out of the structure. He said there might be some cost involved with meeting the property maintenance code, but it was likely much less cost than sprinkling an existing structure.

Amyx said along with the amendments to the Property Maintenance Code, he asked for other amendment needed to other codes that the City would inspect.

McCullough said staff had not identified any other amendments, at this time, that staff would anticipate needing to change.  He said because there was an unknown element to this program in getting into areas like the Oread where they assumed a great deal, but some of staff’s assumptions based on observations on tenant complaints and other complaints because staff had a track record of being in the Oread neighborhood where staff had observed units being constructed without permits.  They would need to meet today’s code standards.  Through that process it was identified that that might be onerous of the scale being discussed and staff offered this alternative compliance method for that one singular issue.

Amyx said the changes to the inspection form were needed.

McCullough said staff would make those changes and would note that as part of the evolution they started off with a much longer list of codes that would be applied to the program and now were down to the Development Code and the Property Maintenance Code.  He said there was a speaker that spoke to confusion about what codes would be applied. 

Farmer said he didn’t hear a clear answer on how pictures taken would be a part of the public record.  The concern was that if a landlord had to take pictures of something to show that something had been fixed and now complied with code, it might not be as precise as a picture as perhaps Planning Staff might have taken.  He asked how they could protect tenants in that maybe people shouldn’t see what they might have in their house.

Larkin said he wouldn’t know who would have access to those pictures and only use those pictures for the purposes of just that case.  He said those pictures would be kept within the department and no one would have access other than City officials.

Farmer asked if it could be requisitioned under any sort of public records act.

Larkin said theoretically a person could make an open records request, but there were certain things like those pictures that related to the third person privacy that staff would be able to close from random request for the information.

Riordan said once the picture had been used and it was old data, would those picture be destroyed.

Larkin said if that was the policy, those pictures would be destroyed.

Riordan said when he moved into his house there was an attached garaged which had a very nice 220 volt wire about 100 feet on steel fence.  He said he didn’t think that was code and they corrected that violation which told him that it probably wasn’t inspected by the City as the final.  One of the concerns people had was things had been done without the proper permits from the City.  He said he understood that staff wasn’t going to force them to change anything unless there was life/safety/health related such as poor egress things that would cause significant problems, but they wouldn’t need to show that was done under some type of permit.

McCullough said they would need to meet the Property Maintenance Code.  If it warrants a research project back to the office and they found that the structure was permitted in a particular year and had not been revised from that permit and the permit was inspected and closed out then they recognize it was a legal permitted structure and wouldn’t need to fix anything.  There were often times violations of the Property Maintenance Code when properties hadn’t received their permits and hadn’t been inspected and they would need to fix those items.

Riordan said for example someone created a 3rd floor apartment in one of the older houses and didn’t have proper egress then if that was the only violation, they would just have to correct that and wouldn’t need to do anything else.

McCullough said correct, generally speaking.  He said he didn’t want to use the term “it depends” because there were so many situations out there and liked to use examples in how they talked about a lot of those issues, but in a lot of instances, it might depend.  If they find evidence that something was walled up last weekend that would be different scenario than when the go into a structure and find that something had been there a good number of years and could tell that by the sinks, countertops and stains on the wall.  He said staff wasn’t avoiding the issues, but what they were reporting was they staff understood and recognized that there had been a lot of development and renovations that had occurred and they didn’t have the resources in this program to go and make every one of those a research project and unveil the exact answer. The benefit would go to the property owner in that as they saw Riordan’s example, the unit would be allowed to exist, would need to meet the property maintenance code and move on from there.

Riordan said if changes were made that were done correctly, staff would go in and see that it was correctly done and leave and there wouldn’t be any other repercussions.

McCullough said correct.

Brian Jimenez, Code Enforcement Manager, said he wanted to comment on the electrical part.  He said there was general language in the property maintenance code that addressed mechanical, plumbing, electrical and structural. Basically that code language says safe working condition.  It gave a lot of discretion and didn’t really depend on when that was in place.  If they find a condition that was unsafe whether it was plumbing, electrical, structural or mechanical, that could be cited.  He said for example, in the structural part of the code was very detailed of all kinds of things exterior and internal that could be deemed against code such as foundation walls buckling, sagging or splitting.  A rock foundation was built when there was no code for foundations, but if staff found a foundation that was in really bad shape, based on the code language provided, staff could cite the owner.        

Riordan said he had heard a comment about the landlord forcing someone to sign the form. 

McCullough said in response to an early input from the landlord stakeholder group was that their plan was to get tenants to sign a consent form upon lease.  He said with the lease paperwork, they would provide their tenants a copy.  He said that was never a requirement from staff or proposal.  Staff anticipated as they did their program today, that as the inspection date came up staff would coordinate the inspection with the landlord first and foremost and as the landlords had the best contact information with tenants, then staff would try to work with the tenants through the landlord to get that consent form signed.  If staff needed to participate more, staff certainly would, but the cooperation staff had to date, was very useful for the landlords, staff, and tenants because everyone was going through people they knew and then staff would get that form before performing their inspection.  There was nothing in the ordinance or administrative regulations that would require a landlord to get that consent form signed at the time of the lease.       

Larkin said it was the City’s responsibility to get the consent.  The consent didn’t need to be in writing and could be oral.  The written consent form was basically protection for staff in case there was ever an issue as to whether or not consent was actually given.

Schumm said regarding the forms that Sutton mentioned in her comments, he asked if all those forms were available now.

McCullough said yes, for the existing program and a consent form that they had been working on as well as the draft check list.

Schumm said if the City Commission chose to pass this ordinance on first reading, he asked if staff could have those forms and the check list available before the second reading for discussion.

McCullough said that could be done, but staff needed some time to get some of that information.  He said there would be a lot of information that staff needed to work on as they implemented this program. There would be education packets, websites, and staff talked about training with landlords and would need to hire staff.  There was a great deal of information yet to be created to implement the program.

Schumm said okay, but what about the specific forms Sutton mentioned.

McCullough said again, staff had the consent form which conveyed the information that the City had a rental program, the narrow scope of the consent, what staff would be attempting to do after they completed their inspections.  He said staff could create and revise the application materials and there was the check list.  The major components were the application, check list and the consent form.

Schumm said those 3 documents were available. 

McCullough said those 3 documents could be available.  He said they would need to tweak the application.  The draft consent and draft check list were available.

Amyx asked if the draft check list was available.

McCullough said there was a check list that staff presented to the City Commission several meetings ago and was basically major/minor listing.  Staff hadn’t gone back to that list until everything had been worked out.  The check list was essentially the major/minor violations that were in the administrative regulations that were in the packet. 

Amyx said regarding the current check list under the RS program now, how did that compare to the new major/minor violations.

McCullough said he didn’t believe it was as detailed and it didn’t distinguish between major and minor.

Jimenez said the under the current program they didn’t have that distinction between those two. Right now, it listed the rooms of the house and on the side of that it had a box for a narrative for the inspector to write what the violation was and a copy was given to the property owner.  He said there was no specific list of violations and was broken down by rooms and then the violation was written in the box.

Dever said the major and minor breakout of the list as well as some clarification or more details would be available for an inspection check list to address some of the concerns people had about the actual scope of this inspection and the details associated with that.

McCullough said the check list in the Commission’s packet under the administrative regulations was fairly detailed, much more detailed in the City’s current check list.  He said the check list on the current program was mainly to assist staff and their walk through of the unit and then staff would provide the violations to the landlord.  This was meant to provide more specifics of the minor/major as it was used for the incentive program.  It had evolved into the check list of most of the violations of the property maintenance code and those were all out of the property maintenance code and the occupancy was out of the development code.  Staff believed this was more information than they currently had in the existing program because it listed out in a lot more detail, what the code standards were in the Property Maintenance Code.            

Dever said the list that was in the administrative compliance procedure that was on the website was basically the summary of those items that would be evaluated during inspection.

McCullough said yes.

Riordan said in 6-1313 of the proposed ordinance, Right of Entry, it talked about staff would contact the resident.  He asked if that was only if staff didn’t have permission in the first place because the wording was unclear.

Larkin said the City had to obtain consent from the tenant or the resident of the property.  If they could go through an intermediary and the landlord could work that out then that was fine.  Otherwise, staff would make contact with the tenant and hopefully the landlord would be involved in that process.  He said staff would then either obtain consent, but if they didn’t obtain consent then staff would seek a warrant if so desired.

Riordan said the only time staff would directly contact the tenant was if the licensee did not have that documentation.

McCullough said by matter of practice and that’s how it was practiced and had been very fruitful for staff.

Riordan said to contact the tenant first without going through the licensee would not be what staff typically did.

McCullough said correct.

Dever said there had been some questions related to metrics or measures of compliance that existed in the existing inspection program and the ability for a person to easily access details regarding what types of items were lacking, what kind of violations existed, how the efficient the City was in carrying out those duties and the time it took to perform those inspections. He asked if McCullough could address staff’s plans were in the event this program would be put in place for metrics to be established and for the Commission to feel confident that his staff could effectively carry out those inspections and also report back to the citizens who were paying staff to perform those inspections so the Commission could effectively communicate the value of this program.

McCullough said one of the things staff had been handicapped for the last 12 years was in the software system that was implemented for this program and others in the development sense for the City.  In 2012, staff went to a new software program which gave staff a lot more power to track metrics and performance measurements and goals and those kinds of things.  One of the challenges was that the Commission and others in the community had asked for data from the current program.  It had been a challenge to call that data from an older system (AS400 System) which didn’t give staff the amount of data and didn’t let staff dig deep enough to get some of those metrics that the community desired.  Staff believed that the software they moved to in 2012 was going to allow staff to manipulate that data and the ordinance provided that staff report to the City Commission periodically about both the cost of the service, fees, as well as staff’s performance in that regard.   

Schumm said they started the rental registration when he was Mayor. He said he saw value in moving forward with this and had done a good job to listen to all the people who were concerned about it.  They compromised several major issues with regard to being business friendly to the apartment industry, they sent in a sampling of the sizes, set a bonus that if they achieved good score they would not see City staff for 6 years, if it was a new structure because it just received a certificate of occupancy and didn’t need to go through inspection for 6 years.  They reduced the fees because this started out about a million dollar project and were down to a half million dollars.  They really compromised a lot in this particular process and were proud they were able to do that.  He said what everyone needed to remember was that this was a business and they were trying to secure a life/safety option that was accommodating to Lawrence’s citizens.  If keeping that in mind, then this was good work that they had done thus far.  He said he didn’t think they were going to trample on anyone’s rights.  If they say there was a minimum of 72 hour notice that had to be given before any inspection could take place with regard to a tenant that was a lot of time for people to prepare without feeling like there was a surprise and didn’t have time to prepare.  He said he agreed that the 3 forms discussed should be ready and should be presented prior to any final passage of this ordinance and that would be the consent form, application and the check list because those were critical parts that make this ordinance work right. He said for the last 10 to 12 years this program had worked very well regarding single-family dwellings.  He said he didn’t believe they were entering into something that was going to be a difficult moment and it is the right way to go and had a lot of value and insures that Lawrence citizens were safe.  He supported this ordinance and hoped to get it done.

Riordan said this was a difficult issue and thought it was great when you see citizens come up with legal advice and raised many questions, some of which he had thought about and some that he had not.  He said out of all those questions, he recommended that the cap be added back and the 72 hour notice was important.  This was an important issue and it was an important activity and weren’t doing this to get into house, but to protect people that needed protection.  Sometimes people don’t realize they need protection.  He said he had many people come to his office who didn’t realize that they had medical problems, but they find those problems afterwards and they were thankful.  He said he would like to protect the people and citizens of Lawrence just like he tried to protect his patients.  He said that was his goal and only objective.  He said he was in favor of this with those two changes with stipulation and with the fact that they should have the forms done.  He said he hoped they could do it tonight.

Farmer said it was frustrating that so many folks waited until the last minute to chime in and give input and wanted to encourage and implore the public as the Commission had things going forward.  He said he received more emails from folks that were opposed to this item in the last week then he ever did before and they had been working on the rental registration for quite a long time.  He said it was frustrating that everyone waited until the last minute to come to the table because the Commission heard a lot of good input.  He agreed with Schumm that this was a business, but it was unnerving that there were so many different interpretations as to what the ordinance says by so many people about what the truth was.  He said he loved what Abraham Lincoln stated which was “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis.  The great point is to bring them the real facts.”  He appreciated the fact that they worked so hard on this issue and City staff had done such a wonderful job, but to him they didn’t do any good at this point in the game to come to the table saying that we don’t have all of the information right now for the implementation of the program. There had been no public input on that process and it was interesting that so many people wanted more time to give input on Rock Chalk Park, but too much time has elapsed for people to give input on the rental registration ordinance.  A lot of the same folks don’t seem to want more time to pass this and get it right. He said he thought they had good data from the previous program, but in his opinion, he didn’t know if they had enough data to mitigate the fears that people had regarding this inspection program.  Last week was a huge piece of humble pie that he had to eat because he had his own opinions regarding the whole roundabout issue and came into that meeting absolutely certain that there was no way in the world that he would ever support one of  those circle things.  Public Works did an amazing job in presenting compelling data and at the end he couldn’t argue with data. It was something that regardless of how he personally felt about it, the fact that roundabout was safer was an inarguable point.  He said to him this should be a head and heart issue. The heart issue was that they wanted safe housing for the most vulnerable in our community and the head issue was that they wanted to know that the program was working and that a lot of people’s fears regarding why it wouldn’t work were unfounded.  Unfortunately, it seemed that each side was trying to make this either a head or a heart issue.   He said if you don’t support this ordinance, then you don’t want safe housing or if you support this ordinance you were being unfriendly to people with mental health issues and was in support of violating the 4th Amendment, provoking distrust and discord with tenants and their landlords.  He said he was interested in seeing data with this rental registration program.  The other program, while comparable, was not the same because the demographics were going to be different in some ways for people that lived in single-family dwellings and multi-family dwellings.  He asked how they could measure affordable housing affects because of this ordinance.  How could they ensure that the concession that many landlords had emailed the Commission about saying that they were going to raise the rent and not by 20 or 40 cents, but by $50 a month and asked how could the Commission ensure that isn’t happening to the most vulnerable citizens in this community.  There had to be a way to measure that because if the Commission passed this ordinance and next year there had been a $50 increase in the amount of rent for many folks then that is something that needs to be looked at because then that cost is being passed on in a more significant way than what the Commission thought in relationship to this ordinance.  He said data was going to be better than the Commission assuming that it would or would not happen.  He asked how the Commission could ensure that the fears that landlords had about their fears in this process are true or not.  How could they ensure the fears tenants had in this process are either true or not.  There as a lot of assumptions out there about this program by so many people and to him the best way to figure out what to do with assumptions was to get some data and get some cold hard facts.  He said he proposed to do some piloting with this program and to get information about implementation out there about the forms, about the education that would happen, about the website that would be done.  He said it was to find a way to work with landlords in this program and tenants on this program and City staff on this program and then use that information to craft a stronger ordinance.  He said when they had something that would affect the majority of citizens in this city everyone would agree that they had to do something to make sure it was done right.  He said he proposed to use the first quarter of 2014 to invite landlords to be a part of piloting this program in its current form with the revisions that Riordan suggested.  He said they could invite the landlords to give input on the forms, on the process from start to finish and hopefully start to figure out how some assumptions that were being made by all parties were either true or not true.  He said then they would have facts and data and could ask a group of landlords to participate or have the landlords volunteer to participate or just go straight down the list and ask if each landlord would participate.  If a landlord chooses not to participate then that would tell him that the landlord really didn’t have a problem and didn’t want to give input and he would say to move forward with the program.  If they chose to participate, all of those fears about search and seizure and 4th Amendment would either be true or not.  He said the Commission owed it to the citizens of this community to get it right.  He said he was closing with something John Adams stated, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”  He said the Commission owed it to this community to get this right.  He said they weren’t planning on implementing this rental registration until September anyway and to him taking the first 3 months to pilot this program, to get input from everyone that had all of those assumptions, to bring all the facts to the table and get this right for the citizens of Lawrence was the very responsible thing to do in this situation.

Dever asked if Farmer was proposing taking the system as it had been given to the Commission and try to administer a pilot program to see how long it takes, what the issues are and to see if the City could pull this off.

Farmer said yes, but the thing about this was both sides weren’t right.  Staff would either have a ton of administrative warrants because all the stuff one side was saying, either that’s right or it’s not.  Either the other side was right or not.  The Commission had nothing to gauge on as policy makers, other than their own assumptions based on interpretations that the Commission was hearing that other people had regarding this ordinance and that was dangerous.  He said that wasn’t being a good policy maker.  If they did this and had facts and data to work and had input from people that were actually going through the process, they would strengthen whatever posting the Commission desired to take.  He said he was going to feel a whole lot better supporting this ordinance.  He said a lot of those fears were completely unfounded and wanted to say that they weren’t true. Right now there wasn’t anything he could say about that because it was just an assumption and the Commission needed more facts in this scenario.

Schumm asked Farmer how a pilot program could be run without the program.   He said they wouldn’t have the ordinance and wouldn’t be the same.  He said what he thought Farmer was saying was that Farmer would like a trial situation to see how it worked and if it worked fine then they would keep on rolling.  If it didn’t work then they either had to re-craft the ordinance or ditch it.  If you don’t have an ordinance than there was no requirement for anyone to get any of their units inspected, even if they were going to do a hundred apartments for the 1st quarter to see how that worked and that was good because that was data collection, but he couldn’t see how that could be replicated without an ordinance.

Farmer suggested taking the ordinance as it stood now.  If the landlords that were present and wanted to give input regarding this process and find out if the assumptions that everybody was making for why this was a terrible idea were either true or not and those landlords don’t participate in that process then that would tell him that that landlord wasn’t willing to figure out what the fact were and sign him up and he would vote “yes” right now.  He said having those facts would be extremely important for making an informed good decision.  He said he wanted some facts to either prove that all of the fears that all the people had were true or to prove that there were not rather than to try to assume that they were or were not because this was a big decision.

Amyx asked if Farmer was asking that this be on a volunteer basis.

Farmer said absolutely and if people didn’t want to participate, then that would tell the Commission that people weren’t willing to figure out what the facts were and if those people weren’t willing to figure out what the facts were and the Commission wanted to keep assuming things, then they would be having this conversation 10 years from now and let’s just get the thing passed.  He said this was more to make sure that the fears that people had were either true or not or founded or not founded.  He said they wouldn’t lose anything by piloting this and inviting people to give input, not about a theory or an ordinance on paper, but from start to finish about the process.                                                 

Schumm asked about the landlords that weren’t present at the meeting and were in favor of this ordinance.

Dever said then those landlords should let staff inspect their properties.

Schumm asked how they would arrive at the sample size or line up a balance of landlords that wanted to do this.

Farmer said that was a wonderful question and if he would have thought about this issue for a month then he would have had some better answers. 

Schumm said he wasn’t trying to put Farmer on the spot, but the Commission needed to come up with an answer for the public tonight.

Farmer suggested setting a certain number of inspections.  He said there would be 1500 inspections a year with 5 inspectors.  He said that was about 6 inspections a day.  If they had staff do 100 inspections with 25 different landlords and maybe take 13 landlords that were completely against and 12 landlords that were for this ordinance in its current state, he thought they could get some really good feedback to make an even stronger and better ordinance and figure out what the facts were regarding this ordinance so that the Commission could make a better decision as policy makers for something that would affect the majority of the citizens.

Riordan said if someone increased their cost by 20 cents to 50 cents a month, in a worse scenario $1.00 to $2.00 a month and wanted to charge him $50 a month they’re a crook.  If someone couldn’t figure that out then the ordinance was for some that needed protection.  He said what Farmer was talking about was anecdotal.  In medicine things seemed reasonable and if something seemed reasonable, you test it out, but you have scientific studies, objective way of doing it, but what Farmer was recommending was still anecdotal and would tell everyone nothing at the end.  It would be emotional and totally from the heart and would have no data that was objective because it was all emotional and that wouldn’t get us anywhere.  He asked how in the heck you would pay for it.  One of the concepts was that it had to be revenue neutral and if the Commission didn’t say yes or no tonight to this ordinance then how could it be paid for and how could they hire people. It costs money to do that and what Farmer was saying was let’s not charge anything for it.  He said what Farmer was trying to do was a wonderful thing, but you couldn’t do it based on fact or information because it was all anecdotal and emotional.  There would be no facts and would have people who were for this and against it.  He said the Commission was doing this for the protection of people and were not doing it to raise money or create some new legislative forbearance for the people of Lawrence, but doing it to protect the citizens.  If what Farmer said would work, then he would be for it, but he couldn’t imagine knowing the science that goes into medicine and knowing the science that had to go into this that you could do what you wanted to do. Therefore in 3 months the Commission would not have any better information and would only be emotional and would not have it paid for.

Farmer said he appreciated what Riordan was saying.  He said first, they didn’t have a scientific study regarding whether or not this would work and perhaps it was anecdotal and maybe it was just a bad idea, but what the fears he was interested in were if they did this with 100 units for 25 different landlords, the fears they heard tonight and they could go back to a litany of things, the 4th amendment rights and how people felt their privacy was being violated.  The cops were going to show up and confiscate drug paraphernalia and hand guns that weren’t registered and hoarders were going to have their mental health condition essentially put on display and dinged for that.  He said it would be an emotion issue but we have the fears that the community had brought forward, but at the end they could say how many confiscations of drug paraphilia actually happened…zero; how many people felt their privacy was being violated…zero; how many hoarder did they see….zero.  He said all of those fears would have no basis to exist because they had facts to back up the fact that they weren’t true. 

Schumm asked if the 11 years of data could be used. He said Farmer indicated there was a different demographic between single family renter and apartment renters, but he didn’t know if there was a difference.  There were a lot of college kids that lived in single-family houses.  There were a lot older people that live in apartments.  He said he didn’t think it was a clear cut demographic that lived in either an apartment or single family home.  He said he kept on coming back to what he heard from staff that they had good experience for 11 years.  He said to him that said it worked.  He said Farmer was suggesting that he wanted to make sure the program worked fine.                                  

Farmer said he didn’t disagree with Schumm, but all the fears that were put on the table in relationship to this ordinance were either true or not. 

Schumm said those were the fears from the apartment owners.  He asked what about the fears from the people who were living in substandard units.  He said those were the fears that were manifested tonight.  He said there were fears on both side. The reason why they were proceeding with this ordinance was because they feared for the health and safety of those people.  He said they had to balance in terms of their fear gage.

Farmer said probably.  He said to him it was both a head and heart issue.  He agreed with Schumm and worked every day on behalf of people in poverty that lived in crappy situations.  He said they had made calls to the City on behalf of clients that were tenants in bad situations.  He thought that they would lose nothing because they’re not rolling this program out until September anyway and could craft a stronger ordinance.  He said maybe nothing would change and it might stay exactly the same, but to him, nothing was lost.  He said they weren’t saying they were going to table the ordinance, but would strengthen the ordinance because everyone knew that something needed to be done.  People lived in dilapidated, terrible conditions.  He said they were starting with the common ground by saying nothing needs to be done but there were all of those fears on both sides.   He said let’s get it figured out to where they could have good information, not only now, but going forward with data to evaluate the program.  He said he wanted to make sure they get this right and wouldn’t lose anything by piloting this program for a few months.  He said it might not take 3 months to inspect 100 units and it could take 2 weeks.  He said with all the information that had yet to be given out regarding the forms, educational materials, and the website, they owned it to the public to have that information available before they passed the ordinance.  He said this was a way that that could simultaneously happen and at the same time the Commission would be receiving factual data to mitigate the fears that a lot of folks had. 

Riordan said what number Farmer would give to say that something was good and bad.  He asked what was scientifically significant and what was accurate.  He said when talking about the heart, they were talking about facts.   He said they had discussed many items and a lot of questions had been asked. If going for the heart, then what Farmer was saying made sense, but if going with facts, he couldn’t understand and couldn’t see how that would help because they had no criteria to decide what was good and bad.

Dever said he disagreed that they would get zero.  He said he was a scientist as well and thought he understood the importance of collecting information and assessing this from a technical standpoint.  He said what good could come from collecting data: 1) they could learn how long it was going to take to do the inspection; 2) identify whether or not this list of items created was really a huge burden and were there really issues or not there weren’t certain issues and should remove from the list; 3) learn whether or not it was going to be difficult or simple to gain access to those units, assuming they had cooperation from the landlord; 4) determine whether or not that there was a real issue and didn’t know if there was a true demographic difference between who they were regulating now and who they would regulate in the future.  He said he had been told on many occasions was that one of the reason they needed to regulate rental housing because the housing stock was so different and because the tenants were so different.  He said he couldn’t disagree with his assessment that those neighborhoods were different.  He said he agreed it might be biased and agree that it might be skewed from the data, but didn’t agree that it would be worthless.  He said it would be difficult to get people to share in this sampling and believed it would be difficult for the Commission to compare and quantify this data, but again, didn’t know if it would be worthless.  He said he was still not certain that they could pull this off in the timeframe they were talking about and for the cost they were talking about.  He said that was the kind of data he wanted before he superimposed this huge subset of inspections on a staff that they believed they could undertake without having done this sample set of housing.   He said he thought there would be some data that would be valuable.  He said he wouldn’t say it was going to be easy to get people to participate or how many people they should use for a pilot program, but it was a reasonable request if a Commissioner was unsure on how they wanted to vote.

Farmer said if people didn’t want to participate, then that would tell him that those people didn’t want the facts.  If we couldn’t get 25 landlords to sign up to inspect 100 units in a week, he suggested putting the ordinance on next week and he’ll vote for the ordinance.  He knows that here was going to be frustration on both sides.  He said his intention was not to put it off longer, but if the side that wanted this for so long was great and none of the fears were founded then that was what the pilot program would tell the Commission.

Dever said staff’s memo indicted that they wouldn’t start the inspections until 2015.  He asked if that was correct.

McCullough said that was a potential.  Staff needed to ramp up this program.  He said they took the direction to wait until September 2014 and looked further and gave themselves a year.

Dever said there was time and questions.  He said he didn’t know if it was worth it or not, but wanted to make sure he shared how he felt about all the stuff going back and forth.

Schumm said he wasn’t against additional input or data, but concerned the Commission was going to give staff a “mission impossible” to do.  He said were they going to ask people to volunteer to go through 100 inspections and come back with data.  He asked if staff had the horsepower to do those inspections.

Amyx said it made sense to receive additional information.   He asked if without an ordinance in place and someone refused the consent, would staff have the ability to get an administrative warrant. 

Corliss said the only way staff could get administrative search warrants was if there was an ordinance in place and a plan in place in order to proceed.  He said that might be an issue.   He said if the Commission was interested in the pilot program, staff would put the right resources on it because that was what staff did, put resources on the City Commission’s priorities.  He said the Commission might want to talk among themselves about how important it was to have this self-selection of landlords in this process or staff had a little bit of ability to come up with a random list and go off of that list.  He said there might be some landlords that might not know anything that was going on and in which case staff would need to educate those landlords about what staff was trying to do in this volunteer situation.  He said they might be able to get a little bit better sample size.  He said the Commission might want some level of not just self-selection.  He said some landlords might be opposed, but others might be in favor of the rental registration that might want to be involved.  He said staff could do it in a way to decide who to contact.  He said the Commission needed to decide at what level of information they wanted in order to proceed.

Dever said to be totally blunt, and they didn’t do the pilot, was Farmer comfortable with moving forward with the program at this time.

Farmer said his preference would be to do the pilot project, if two of the Commissioner’s would go along with the pilot program.  He said on the administrative warrant, if it got to that point and they did a hundred units and 60 units they had to obtain administrative warrants then that fear was obviously founded.  He said Dever had asked about the science of this whole thing.  He said if this was going to be as big of a deal as people were trying to make it sound like, then there would be a lot issues.  If they had 1 out of 100, then that wasn’t a big issue.  If it gets to the administrative warrant process, obviously they couldn’t go through the process without an ordinance, but that information could be documented. He said the Commission owed it to the community to get it right.  He would be extremely sad if he had to cast a vote based upon many assumptions.  He said he would rather have facts for the sake of both sides so that in a few years, if something were to come up, the Commission could say that they did their due diligence and made sure it wasn’t going to be an issue.

Riordan said if he gave the impression that a pilot program would be worthless, the question was if it was worthwhile or was it worthless and he still thought the City would have no ability to do that pilot program.  He said if asking 100 landlords whether code enforcement staff could come in or not and participate, he asked what the motivation was for saying “no.”  He asked would it be the same as if they were under this provision.  Did they say no because they didn’t want to be bothered with it or have time?  If there was someone that was a renter and didn’t want code enforcement in since there wasn’t an ordinance, code enforcement wouldn’t have the ability to go in?  He said he didn’t know what the data was going to mean.  He said whether it was worthless or worthwhile, accurate or inaccurate, when it’s presented to the Commission, he would ask about the specificity; what was the accuracy and how was it measured; and, what was the motivation of the people and the landlords that participate.  He said people didn’t like change. He said when talking about the roundabouts, he thought it was very interesting that the people who were against the roundabouts, two-thirds were for the roundabouts after they lived with it for a while.  He said he wasn’t sure the sample size would be accurate or tell him anything.  He said he wasn’t saying it was good or bad, he was just saying when presenting the data to him, he asked how would he be convinced that it meant anything. He said his thought was they were going to do something that they couldn’t say scientifically that it meant anything which meant they were anecdotal and doing it based on the heart.  He said he didn’t think leadership should be based on the heart, but on facts.  The fact that there had been a lot of questions asked was answered to him adequately.  He said he didn’t understand how that would give him data that he could believe and make a decision on.  He said it was a great and wonderful idea, but he couldn’t see that it would give him any data that would help.  He said he didn’t know the motivation of the people and what the data would be.

Farmer said there was value in this conversation because right now they didn’t have anything.  He said they had both sides saying this was really good because it was going to keep people safe which was true and had the other side saying 4th amendment etc…  He said they didn’t have anything to say whether or not those fears were founded.  He said to him the motivation were wanting to be able to say at the end of the day, that this huge cloak of assumptions regarding all of those potential issues, when they piloted this program, weren’t issues at all and to him strengthened the program.  It strengthened the program by the City Commission doing their due diligence as policy makers to ensure that they received input on everything from start to finish.  He said they might get the sense from landlords when seeing the form and getting input on the form that different parts of the form needed to change or that they needed to inspect things that they weren’t planning on inspecting or visa-versa, but until they actually see the process in something more than just on paper and in theory, to him there was value in seeing something come to life that was currently not alive.  He said he didn’t know if the data at the end of day was going to be good or bad data, but to him it was something and right now they had nothing and to him there was inherent value in that.

Dever asked Farmer what he would say regarding Schumm’s question about the fact that they had all this data relative to the single-family neighborhoods.

Farmer said they already heard that the inspection protocols were going to be different.  He asked if they could compare apples to oranges when planning staff said those were two different things.  He said if they’re going to be two entirely different processes, he asked if they could compare apples to oranges.

Schumm said he didn’t hear that staff indicted that the protocols would be different.

Corliss said it was the same ordinance.

Farmer asked if the form was different.

Amyx said it was different from what the City was using right now.

McCullough said just to incorporate the incentive program, but it was the same codes same type of inspection, and same general process, but the forms would certainly need to be changed because the ordinance as presented and if approved, would have different elements such as sample size, major minor violations, and those types of things.

Amyx said he was a landlord and it was a business and was operated as such.  He said the real fear was that there might be some forms that weren’t available, whether it be the amendment to the property maintenance code, the check list form that wasn’t available, and the ordinance as written with the 53 minor and major violations which was a scary thing as a landlord that was trying to run a business.  He said it was important that the majority of those that own and operated rental property to make sure that life and safety issues were followed.   Over the last several months, he brought up an idea as they looked at the violation list to define a lot shorter list.  He said the question was how and do we need to be inspected on those properties.  If they needed to have an ordinance that would require licensing and inspection, he suggested really looking at the list of those violations.  What are those life safety issues?  We could have a difference in opinion of what they really are but you look at proper installation and venting of furnaces, smoke detectors, Hot water heaters, fire extinguishers, electrical panel cover boxes, those are the things that are really life safety issues.   He said if we do have a responsibility in making sure that tenants are living in good condition, those are the things we should be looking at.  He said he didn’t look at grass and weeds as a life safety issue.  If we are going to do this, we look at this life safety issue he mentioned.  He said before the City Commission passed anything, to make sure that everything that was required was available to the public upon request.  He said it maybe it is too early in the process in defense of staff and we haven’t come to agreement on what the inspection should look like so I can’t ask them to print it now. But if someone asks what the inspection form looks like and he can’t answer because it hasn’t been written yet, or what are the amendments that are going to happen to the development code or property maintenance code, and we can’t answer yet, I think it is a little unfair to the public.  There a number of things to consider.  He said they were going to affect a large part of the population in Lawrence and needed to make sure they had it right and everyone had an understanding of what they would be doing.  He said he would hope that before they adopted this ordinance, to look at the life safety issues.  In the event that a majority of the City Commission wished to proceed, he thought that ample time between the 1st and 2nd reading should be given to look at the inspection check list and take all matters into consideration.                                                                      

Dever asked if Amyx wasn’t in favor of the pilot project.

Amyx said he needed to answer that question.

Farmer said Amyx indicted they needed to take the time to get it right and it sounded as though Amyx was trying to regurgitate what he was trying to say.

Schumm said there was one more fundamental part.  He said there were two parts to this ordinance 1) which was life safety issue and 2) the environmental package.  He said when only focusing on the life safety it indicated that the Commission didn’t care and weren’t going to worry about the environmental package.

Amyx said it was already written. 

Schumm said not inspecting a rental property and would not call the owner then they would be putting a seal of approval on, “it’s okay to rot away.”

Amyx said the purpose of this ordinance was that the governing body found that in order to advance the health, safety, and welfare of the residents of the City of Lawrence, it was necessary to regulate certain activities, including the renting, leasing, subleasing, or letting of residential rental property within the City. 

Schumm said under welfare, wasn’t the welfare of the neighborhood included?  He said when allowing a structure to rot way, did it not affect the neighbors around that structure.

Amyx said yes.

Dever said Amyx was saying that there were already codes in place.

Amyx said there was codes in place and weren’t writing anything new, other than requiring everyone to get a license and everyone be inspected.  He said as he looked at the list of 53 items, everything he would need to do, he said some landlords might not be able to absorb those cost for their structures.  Ultimately, there was going to be pass-through on those costs that would be involved.

Schumm said but they were required to do that already.

Amyx said he understood.

Riordan said what Amyx was saying was that things that should have been done already and hadn’t been done, I shouldn’t need to pay for.  He said they were required to do it and all they were asking them to do what they should have been doing all along. He said it wasn’t a witch hunt, but looking at things that they should do. 

Amyx said as they look at the items in the Ordinance, his main concern was to follow the life safety part of the ordinance. He said some landlords were always making improvements to property. He said if landlords found out violations through the inspection process then landlords would have to pay for violations then.

Dever said he had been with Amyx with his desire to focus more keenly on those items that addressed health/safety/welfare of the renters because there was already code for staff to drive by and site for those violation especially on the outside of the building.  He said rotting wood, falling down structure, dilapidated structure, weeds, illegally parked vehicles and unregistered vehicles were already in the code.  He said he didn’t know how that affected the safety of the residences, but it did affect the welfare of the community.  He asked if Amyx would vote for this under any circumstances, assuming that they were able to alter the list of items inspected.

Amyx said sure.

Dever said Amyx was saying that it was not true to the purpose of the code.

Amyx said if it was truly about life/safety as he understood and if that list included those items that he discussed rather than going after anything and everything that on there then he would vote for this.

Dever asked if the Commission would concede that a way to determine if there was really a need for inspection would be to do a trail assessment of this to see if there were other sorts of other issues to evaluate and whether or not that impacted the ability for the inspector to carry out their duties or do you want to revise the code to state specifically that this was more about welfare of the community, neighborhoods and the occupants?

Farmer said that the whole reason why he was suggesting the pilot program was to get input like Dever was giving and to let other landlords to give input too.  To clarify or amplify, that would be the purpose for something like this.

Dever said he had been straight forward with his desire to keep this simple because of the magnitude of the challenge and because they wanted to do it right.  He said he always wanted to minimize the list to those things he believed were geared toward life and safety and health and safety.  He said staff asked why they would do it this way for one group and not for the other or the environmental code said this and if someone called in a problem, those were the things they had to choose from to cite someone for, but that was more complaint based and complaint driven and there were less quantities of those to do.  He said he was not comfortable with the scope of services that they were proposing to do.  I tried to come up with what he believed could be optional or not a big deal or maybe noted on a check list, but wouldn’t rise to a list of minor or major infractions. He said he realized he wouldn’t get anywhere with trying to negotiate those items.  He said he tried to come up with things that were reasonable and important things that they should be addressing and what ther communities were addressing.  He said when people talked about what other communities did and they would need to boil it down to the facts of what they do.  In most communities, when they have a rental inspection program it was about fire protection, safety and about the residence and not about blight for neighborhood and was usually about occupancy and the interior portion of the building.  He said that was his biggest concern and was not convinced that we needed to be looking at all those items on a regular bases and more importantly, he wasn’t sure they could do that effectively in the timeframe that we budgeted.  He said he always believed the City should register rental properties because they might need to get in touch with the landlords when there were problems or when a tenant calls in a problem and there were people that owned LLC or shielded somehow and we couldn’t gain access to the property.  He said he didn’t own any rental properties, but Amyx pointed out that it was a business.  He said any business should be registered in this City.  He said he had always been in favor of registration.  He said he believe inspections should be done as well, but wasn’t comfortable with the list as proposed.  He is concerned that if they did include all those items, Riordan was right that some landlords were getting away with providing housing that didn’t meet the current code.  He said he had other people indicate that they were comfortable with those conditions and this is all they can afford, all that was what they could fit within their budget.  He said he was a little concerned by this encompassing use of power that they start sorting out affordable housing from people who otherwise couldn’t have it or were getting into what they believed what was right versus what someone would be living with.  He said such as the size of the rooms, height of ceiling and other things where they would get into bigger problems.  He said those were serious problems the City would encounter in the future because of the housing stock being inspected.  He said those were tangible issues that would alleviate housing.  He said when they alleviate a room in a house they would drive up the cost of the rent in a building because there would be less units to rent because they didn’t meet the criteria therefore, the landlords would apply those fees across a smaller number of people and the rates were going to go up.  The unattended consequence would be an increase in the cost of rent.  He said people had written that they should be able to choose how tall their ceiling were or how big their rooms should be and the city shouldn‘t be regulating that.  He said some of the language in the standard, he would be in favor of moving forward if they removed some of the items and they removed some of the overly broad language from the standard and were specific with the lists and with the programs that staff would administer and how they were going to administer because it needed to be black and white for the community to really weight in on so they could be held responsible because it was such a huge group of properties the City would be looking at.  He didn’t believe they could have any vagaries and needed to be black and white.  He said they led him to the cost of the program.  One of the reasons he was interested when he said that was because of the cost of the program and how much was this program going to cost the community.  He said they wouldn’t know those cost until they did it.  He said there was a good set of data from the property inspections that staff had completed, but the data would be many ways different from what they were proposing to inspect.  He said he didn’t know how long it would take or whether the City could afford it based on the fees that they were proposing to charge.  He said he wanted to make sure the funding was ironed out before moving forward. If this wasn’t funding itself, nowhere did it say how it would be paid for if it cost more than anticipated.  He said if they did some of those inspections, they could get a good gage of what it would cost to do those, especially in residential areas, the older housing stock and some of the Oread Neighborhood District.   He said he was in favor of moving forward with inspections, but not comfortable with the current list.  He said he had been swayed that direction the last few days as he received a lot of feedback from people who were living in those places.  Not landlords.  He said he heard more from tenants than landlords the last couple weeks.  He said the compromise was that he was prepared to take a vote on this and would also be willing to pull together more data so that they could effectively manage this program and pay for it using the funds that come in from the program, but a lot of people questioned whether it was an operation that the city could operate and fund with the revenues that were identified.

Schumm said there were two for the ordinance and three against the ordinance.  He said he had Riordan and Schumm for it and the rest of the Commission against it as it is tonight.  He said he might be wrong, but then the question was if they were doing to proceed with this trial balloon, did they want to hold through what they were ultimately going to end up with in the final version of the ordinance and then is there 3 or 4 people to make that go forward?

Dever said that was a great question and respectfully thought there were 3 votes for the list and wasn’t going to hammer that in their study session.  He said if people were wanting to move forward then that was fine and didn’t want to waste everyone’s time trying to sit down and break this out.  He said something as simple as a deadbolt lock and the way it needed to be installed on an exterior door.  He said last week a person asked how he would do this.  He said those were simple problems that he didn’t know how they would be resolved in some of those older homes.

Farmer said he supported this and would support it tonight.  He felt like he wants to either prove the two of them wrong or the two of them right regarding some of those things and some of the fears and concerns that were brought up.  He said they might hear that some of those things were in fact issues or in fact were not. He thought the pilot program was a responsible thing to do. He said it was responsible for the City Commission and get more information to the community about the process and how it would work.  He asked Corliss if 1500 inspections, with 5 inspectors would be 6 inspections per day.  If staff only did rental registration and that was all they did, he asked what about all the other code enforcement issues because it seemed that some of Dever’s concerns were legitimate and asked if they needed to pour resources into this program to make it successful.

McCullough said the resources that they had identified with 5 inspectors and administrative assistant was for the rental program only and no other code enforcement responsibilities. 

Farmer asked how many other code enforcement staff they would have if someone called to complain about a loud neighbor.

McCullough said they had two others that work on code enforcement cases, plus the supervisor, that’s Brian. 

Farmer said they would be able to tell by virtue of a pilot program if those inspections, and hypothetically took an hour and a half and would do 6 inspections per day and then the Commission would know that in no way that 6 per day could be accomplished if it took an hour and a half.

McCullough said there was going to be a lot of data and issues that would present themselves as the program unfolded.  He said inspections would be faster over the years as well.  He said staff recognized that the first several years until staff could reach every property there would be much more effort exerted in that first round in touching properties and afterwards.  He said staff couldn’t tell the Commission the average time on inspection because it would vary greatly.

Farmer asked if this pilot process be helpful for getting at some of that information for McCullough and his staff.

McCullough said the pilot program could be helpful.  One of the concerns he had was because this was such a charged issue that they might see some contrived outcomes where people were pushing their advocacy points and practice.   He said would we get to Riordan’s issue of trusting the outcome and data if people were actually pushing and pulling on a pilot program to reach a certain outcome that they would advocate for.  Another way to do it perhaps was that Manhattan came to their City Commission with quarterly or however often reports on the progress of the program with lessons learned and how they needed to adjust the program and even code amendments.  He said he firmly believed that they would have issues that would demand code amendments as they get into properties and understand those more.  He said they wouldn’t know about some of the issues until they implement the program, take a flexible approach and keep the City Commission advised every step of the way about the implementation of that program, build that data in those first couple of years and then present the City Commission with an ordinance revisions to react to whatever the data provided.

Dever said it would be skewed.  He said for him it was about knowing how long it would take and it would be skewed from that point too but if it took 2 or 3 years to get through all the stock or whatever the eventually might be, they were doing to need to know how many hours it would take and they really wouldn’t know that other than the anecdotal data they had from historical inspections.

McCullough said staff needed a starting point and the implementation would avail certain issues that staff would need to react to and would be presenting the City Commission with revisions as it gets implemented.  Any program such as this, they could have every answer to every question.  He said staff would need to learn what those were in order to respond to them.

Dever said McCullough was proposing to pass the ordinance and request quarterly assessment of how it was going and see how it went from there.

Schumm said he was hearing that if they pared the list down to significant health life-safety issues that there appeared to be two Commissioners willing to move forward.  He said he liked Farmer’s idea about trying to collect as much data as they could, but had a hard time feeling that the information that would be received on a pilot program would be tangible and solid and pure. He said it would get twisted one way or another and would go through an extraordinary exercise and there would be some information, but wasn’t sure it was the real stuff.  He suggested going through the list tonight, pare the list and directed staff to come back with the forms and new list to see if the Commission wanted to move forward on this.

Riordan said that would be great.  He said it was a situation where if this was a perfect world, a pilot program would work great, but being an imperfect world, he wasn’t sure it would work great. He would want something and would much rather have something paired down and regulated.

Schumm said he was willing to go with the idea that Code Enforcement should take care of the exterior of the units.  It was visible and staff wouldn’t need to go inside a unit.  In hopes of moving this forward.  He said wasn’t trying to do this to not consider and be accommodating to his point of view, he just had a hard time with what information they were going to get.

Amyx asked if there was an inspection list that staff used now.

McCullough said this all came from the property maintenance code which was the code they applied on complaint based inspections.  All of these were life/safety issues in the eyes of the property maintenance code.  The list in the administrative regulations was the list to look at if wanting to start peeling out certain code standards of the Property Maintenance Code.  Staff would need to draft language that exempted certain standards from the Property Maintenance Code which would still be applied in complaint based inspections.  He said they were getting back to the discussion about having two sets of codes for Property Maintenance.  He said it could be done but it was a slippery slope because it created its own set of confusing elements for the community, landlords, tenants and staff.

Schumm asked if McCullough back to the Commission in a week or two with some recommendations.

McCullough said staff could.

Schumm asked if staff would prefer to have the City Commission come back with recommendations.

McCullough said it was more meaningful among the City Commission.

Schumm said what if the Mayor, Amyx and McCullough met and listed those recommendations out.  He said then the City Commission would have a chance to either agree or disagree with each point, but at least there was a starting point to look at.

Farmer said he was curious to know if there was support among this group for a pilot program.

Dever said he was in favor of moving forward with evaluating this program, but not for the same purpose or for the same reason that Farmer wanted to.  He said he thought there weren’t enough Commissioners that would want to attempt a pilot program from what he was hearing.

Schumm suggested tabling this item for a week or two.

Corliss said a week really only gave staff a day.

Schumm suggested tabling for two weeks so that everyone could think about their position, received new information to see if there was enough information to hang your hat on and make it work.

Amyx asked if Farmer could give more information on his pilot program.

Farmer said he was with everyone that the data could be skewed, but it might not be.

Dever said they should be able to look at something and know if it skewed.

Farmer said the City Commission received letters from a landlord indicating that the rental program was a terrible idea and not to do it and mysteriously, with five of their tenants, staff would need to obtain administrative search warrants. He said the City Commission was smart enough to make an informed decision with that information.

Dever said they had data that they could rely on.  He said initially it was more difficult to gain access as people got with the program they understood and it became less difficult.  The other questions raised about how long it would take, what would be seen, and how people would feel.

Schumm said it would take a lot less with a shorter list.

Amyx asked for confirmation that the Commission’s goal was to bring back a recommended check list.

Schumm said if it was all about life/safety would they be all major violations.

Riordan said they were all looking at what was best for the citizens.  He said he would be willing to table this item for two weeks because even though it was pain it was still the process of democracy.

Corliss said since a number of the stakeholders were present, if tabling it for two weeks it would be staff’s hope that within a week from this Thursday, staff would be posting at least a revised concept paper that talked about what the major violations that would be inspected would be.

Dever said some of the public comment the City Commission received and some of the Commissioners complaints were that they needed an example of what they were going to do.  He said if they came back with a list and showed that list and whether or not the Commission agreed to the list or not that would be the first draft and would still have the original list in which they could add to it.  He said people needed to see what that list looked like and understand the process.   He said there was quite a bit of wiggle room in the ordinance as it stood right now and that some people were uncomfortable with.  He said part of that was due to how large the scope was.  He said if they were more specific and more targeted, they could be more black and white. He said if they were going to move forward with this item, two weeks from today, he would like to make sure about the overly broad language removed, the administrative compliance procedures tightened up, and the oversight of the number of units put back in that might have been left out.        

Moved by Schumm, seconded by Amyx, to table Ordinance No. 8840 for two weeks for additional information. Motion carried unanimously.

Dever said he would get a list and they would get together and hone it and present it for further comment.   

E.         PUBLIC COMMENT:                      

Brandy Sutton said she would ask that the City Commission look at the ACLU issue.  He said they had originally came forward and asked to have additional time to change leases, however, it had come to her attention that they might not be able to do what they had thought they could do with the lease changes and the ACLU were raising issues about that.  Obviously, they didn’t want to put something in their leases that would invite a class action.

Corliss said staff could provide a response to the ACLU.

A person said up until this past July he had never seen the tenants consent to inspect document and it was footnoted at May 2013.  Subsequently, last week he received a new and improved document with an extra paragraph at the very end where it would give City Inspectors a second bite of the apple to come back in and re-document that things had been repaired.  He said he had not seen that document before and what motivated his concerns especially with the civil liberties issue regarding the digital and video imaging.  He said he had never seen an inspection check list in any of the inspection that he had every done on any of his single family homes.

Dever said that was because they weren’t in the public domain and was one of the reasons they were doing this to tighten things up.

Dan Dannenberg said it was obvious that this Commission as previous Commissions were incapable of forming and administering any kind of rental registration or inspection program in this City.  He said there was one Commission that seemed to indicate earlier on that illegal activities in rental properties were permitted. They had a serial landlord that was in conflict of interest sitting on the Commission.  They had a ridiculous pilot project and they were just kicking the can down the road which was what the landlords and the non-resident property owners wanted.  They didn’t want any resolution to this and just wanted it to keep going and going until it finally died.  He said he didn’t get any response in many instances when he reported to Code Enforcement.  He said that division was so overwhelmed and so probably just flat afraid to approach someone about an issue or they didn’t tell him that he was full of it and not to call Code Enforcement anymore. 

He said regarding hoarding, they had a situation on his street a couple of years ago where an individual was piling stuff up outside into the front yard and they knew it was a problem, but did they call the City.  He said over course not, because the City was too dysfunctional and inept to deal with this sort of problem.  He said they contacted Kansas Adult Protective Services and they dealt with the problem. The individual was found to be not able to live independently and was moved to a care facility and his property had been cleaned up and rehabilitated.  He said they didn’t even bother with the City and that was what was needed. He said the City needed to protect neighborhood and some avenue where they could go outside the City which didn’t want to protect neighborhoods and wanted to protect landlords, non-resident property owners and the apartment association.  He said he had a proposal, he thought this program, Code Enforcement, and rental registration should be administered through a receivership run by a Federal District Judge.  There were precedents for this and that way the City Commission was out of it, City staff in this area would only respond to the judge and whomever the judge reports as administrator.  The City was not going to do any kind of effective administration of this program with 5 inspectors and was just a joke, absolute joke and to give 6 years an incentive between inspections if the City happened to pass a rental unit and was that what really would happen.  He said that was absolutely ridiculous that was just giving carte blanche for somebody to say they didn’t need to do anything for 6 years. He said this whole process so far was just absurd and the ultimate model here was the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.  As you well know, the City of Kansas City Missouri Police Department had no control of its own Police Department for decades and that was because back in the early 1900’s it was found that the Police Department was so corrupt and so ineffective that they couldn’t serve the people of the community and that was where they were here, now with this program.  He said he didn’t get served by the rental registration program because non-resident property owners were the god’s and as a residential property owner he didn’t count.  He said to think to what happened in this rental property didn’t affect the other neighborhoods was ridiculous.  He said you couldn’t look at this rental property as a single-entity with no effect on rest of the neighborhood. 

One final anecdote and he would quit.  Two years ago, in August, when the President of Sunset Hills Neighborhood Association and he was making their annual walk down University Drive to introduce themselves and distribute information to new renters, they came upon an elderly man living in a duplex, which was a piece of junk, who was living by himself.  He said they asked how the elderly man was doing and the elderly man said his health wasn’t too good.

Dever said Dannenberg’s time was up and didn’t need to hear the rest of the analogy, but thanked Dannenberg.  He said Dannenberg had 7 minutes to speak and he appreciated it.

Candice Davis said she still had some concerns about some of the environmental issues that she thought were being taken off the table and thought those were important issues in the neighborhood, especially, deterioration of a house. She asked why a City official would inspect the exterior if they had an inspector looking and inspecting the interior.  It seemed like it was much more efficient if seeing a problem with the exterior violation that that could be noted and follow up. 

As far as the public not getting ample opportunity for information, she thought Farmer was new to this topic and knew he had a sincere interest in low-income people, but this had been something that had been discussed for 5 years and 3 other Commission’s had voted that they agreed to support a rental program, but then finally never funded the program when the time came.  She said this was something that the public had plenty of time to participate in.  Farmer had mentioned they had received a number of calls, but she didn’t know who was making or promoting those calls, but to her mind, if they weren’t able to show up for the last 5 years then they were late to the game.  She said there had been plenty of publicity and opportunity to participate.  She said she commended the City and the Commission for providing a lot of opportunity for input.  She said there were 3 lawyers present and people who lived in the neighborhood.  There were a lot of landlords that spoke that were also interested in supporting this rental registration program.  She was disappointed and thought this was a great opportunity to do something wonderful for the community and hoped somehow it could be wrestled out.            

Dever said the City Commission wasn’t done yet.  He said he wanted to point out that just because people came late, didn’t mean their voice wasn’t important.  He said he wanted to make sure that what Dannenberg alleged about the City’s lack of proper process.

Davis said she didn’t even listen to what Dannenberg had to say.

Dever said it was 11:59 pm and someone was still present to speak, he had to respect everyone’s opinion.  He said he agreed with Davis and Farmer that it was very difficult to move forward when more information was being thrown you at the 11th hour and feeling comfortable with your decision.  He said he had to respect everyone’s opinion.

Farmer said he wanted to clarify his comments.  He said he was disappointed that so many waited this long to let their voices be heard, but as far as more time, he wasn’t talking about for more input, but things related to the things that weren’t public record yet such as the forms, educational materials and things that the Commission even had seen. 

Davis said she totally agreed with the forms, but she thought that the use of City staff made sense if they were environmental problems when going on site and see it, their time shouldn’t be wasted having to come out again.  She said efficiency was important too.  She said she didn’t mean that the list could be honed down to some extent, but thought something were very important for the health and welfare of the community and neighborhoods.        

Paulette Teague asked why they just couldn’t do baby steps and start with rental licensing.  She said find out who the owners, managers or emergency personnel were, pay a fee and build up money for staff time and go from there.

F.         FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS:

David Corliss, City Manager, outlined potential future agenda items.

G:        COMMISSION ITEMS:  

Farmer said just to clarify and make it public record, the City had not fined, Debbie Nall, $500 a day and forced her to evict people and everything that KCTV 5 said was inaccurate.

Corliss said the City had not fined that property owner and staff had contact with her about two years ago and that issue was resolved.  He said staff was not certain why the issue had been brought up again, but staff made a call to find out what concerns she might have presently.  He said the City wasn’t threatening her ability to live in that home.

Schumm said he found the reporting from the Blaze, Channel 4, and Fox News unethical.  He said his name was on the City’s website and no one tried to call him and he would have been more than happy to comment.  He said he didn’t know if any other Commissioner received a call, but they basically said that no one was available for comment.  He said it called the question of ethics right on the table.

Farmer said he would have gladly given his Thanksgiving morning call to Schumm.

Schumm asked if Farmer received a call from the press.

Farmer said no.          

H:        CALENDAR:

David Corliss, City Manager, reviewed calendar items

I:          CURRENT VACANCIES – BOARDS/COMMISSIONS:

Existing and upcoming vacancies on City of Lawrence Boards and Commissions were listed on the agenda.

Moved by Riordan, seconded by Amyx, to adjourn at 10:11 p.m. Motion carried unanimously.

MINUTES APPROVED BY THE CITY COMMISSION ON JANUARY 14, 2014.