Cedar Rapids council's plans to shape up housing has landlords hot

Landlords are howling. Their attorneys are on the line. Neighborhood leaders, meanwhile, are mobilizing. Stick to your guns, they are telling the City Council.

The clash is over the council's proposed revision of the city's housing code. It does at least three things that anger landlords:

-Requires landlords to obtain a city landlord license and pay a one-time $50 fee.

-Requires landlords to register each property and pay a fee on it annually, instead of just once every five years when a property is inspected. The fees will be higher.

-Requires a 'crime-free addendum' to all leases, so tenants and landlords understand that it is cause for eviction when a tenant, guest or associate commits certain crimes on or near a person's rental unit.

The council approved the first of three required readings last month and is slated to vote on the second reading Tuesday evening.

Landlords of Linn County member Tim Conklin, who owns about 20 rental units and manages another 1,700 in the Cedar Rapids metro area, will be on hand, and he promises he'll have an attorney with him.

'For the city to come in and mandate my relationship with my tenants is overstepping the line,' Conklin said.

'It's too much Big Brother getting involved in my business.' Terry Bilsland, president of the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association, will remind the council that the city has been working with neighborhood leaders for four years to find a way to take on problem landlords and problem tenants to clean up neighborhoods and make them safer.

'I'm tired of working on stuff, and then we go down the line and they drop it and don't do anything,' Bilsland said. 'And if that happens to this thing, I'll never help the city again.'

Two groups - Landlords of Linn County and Flood-Impacted Landlords - are asking the city to scrap the new code, or at the least, to make the crimefree addendum optional.

It's estimated the city has about 4,000 landlords.

Ken Koch, a longtime Realtor and landlord, calls the ordinance changes a grab for more money by the city. Dick Rehman, a longtime Cedar Rapids landlord, said the fee increases alone are enough to anger any landlord.

Under one proposal, a landlord's average cost would go from $15 to $55 a year for registration and inspection of a single-family home and from $32 to $90 for registration and inspection of a four-plex.

All the city needs to do, said Koch, is enforce the law now on the books, and all neighborhood leaders and any badly treated tenants need to do, he said, is 'keep complaining' to the city's enforcement office.

Mari Davis, co-founder of Flood-Impacted Landlords, is particularly troubled by the mandated crime-free addendum to leases. She said it contains ambiguous language, may violate a tenant's rights and sets the landlord up to be penalized for a tenant's actions. State law, she said, already allows landlords to evict in instances of 'clear and present danger.' Davis, who like many landlords does some tenant background checks on her own, wants Cedar Rapids to do it like Davenport does.

Davenport police Capt. Kevin Murphy said his department does background checks with the assistance of community volunteers. His department also asks landlords to attach a crime-free addendum to leases. The addendum is voluntary, but most landlords see it as a benefit, he said.

Cedar Rapids police Lt.

Chuck Mincks said the Cedar Rapids addendum will 'give a little more teeth' to landlords and the city as they try to evict tenants at nuisance properties.

Now, he said, it's not uncom­mon to have the tenant and landlord in a court battle of 'he said, she said' over what the rental rules are. The addendum should help eliminate that. At the same time, he said, it holds accountable landlords who now do nothing about problem tenants.

Jerry McGrane, vice president of the Oakhill Jackson Neighborhood Association who helped craft the city's 'Enhance Our Neighborhoods' initiative as a City Council member four years ago, said the new housing ordinance will finally give the city more tools to clamp down on landlords who don't follow the rules.

Wellington Heights' Bilsland said the city's bad landlords think all they should do is collect rent and leave the rest to the neighbors and the police.

'And that's bunk,' Bilsland said.

City Council member Chuck Swore, who has six rental units in the city himself, said the new ordinance will give the city a way to better track rental properties, in part by raising additional revenue to let the city upgrade its computer software.

The proposed new fees are not 'out of line,' he said.

Matt Widner, the city's code enforcement manager, said the new fees will pay 77 percent of the cost of his office's expenses, up from the current 43 percent.

Swore said he understands landlords' complaints that they now face new regulations because of the actions of a small number of bad landlords. For his part, Swore believes the city ought to implement the new ordinance and work out bugs, rather than do nothing and wait for the day when someone comes up with a perfect ordinance.