Landlords vs. neighborhood leaders and city officials on cure for bad landlords and bad tenants

CEDAR RAPIDS - Landlords are howling here. Their attorney is on the line. Neighborhood leaders, meanwhile, are mobilizing. Stick to your guns, they are telling the City Council.

The clash is over the City Council's proposed revision of Chapter 29 of the city's municipal code, which is the city's housing code.

The council approved a first of three required readings of the revised ordinance last month, and the council is slated to vote on the second reading on 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 among landlords 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 says. “It's too much Big Brother getting involved in my business.”

Longtime neighborhood leader Terry Bilsland, president of the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association, will remind the City Council on Tuesday that the city has been working with neighborhood leaders for four years to find a way to take on problem landlords and problem tenants in order 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 says. “And if that happens to this thing, I'll never help the city again.”

The battleground, the new revised housing code, is doing at least three things that anger landlords: It requires landlords to obtain a city landlord license and pay a one-time, $50 fee. It will require landlords to register each property and pay a fee on it annually, instead of just once every five years when a property is inspected. Overall, the fees will be higher. And the new code 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.

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

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

    By way of example, one fee proposal under consideration by the city would increase a landlord's average cost 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, according to city figures.

 Forget the hike in fees, says Koch, and enforce the law now on the books. All neighborhood leaders and tenants with grievances need to do, he adds, 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, an addition which she says 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 says, 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, where the police department provides background checking of tenants for landlords with the help of community volunteers.

Davenport police Capt. Kevin Murphy confirms that his department does do tenant background checks with the assistance of community volunteers, and he says 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 says.

Cedar Rapids police Lt. Chuck Mincks says the Cedar Rapids addendum will “give a little more teeth” to both landlords and the city as they try to evict tenants at nuisance properties. Now, he says 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, he says. At the same time, he adds, it holds landlords accountable who don't now do anything 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, says the new housing ordinance will finally give the city some more tools to clamp down on landlords who don't follow the rules.

Wellington Heights' Bilsland says 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 says.

City Council member Chuck Swore, who has six rental units in the city himself, says the new ordinance will give the city a way to better track rental properties, in part, by raising some additional revenue to let the city upgrade its computer software. The proposed new fees are not “out of line,” he says, and Matt Widner, the city's code enforcement manager, says the new fees will pay 77 percent of the cost of his office's expenses, up from the current 43 percent of the cost.

Swore says he understands the landlords' complaint that they now must face some new regulations because of the actions of a small number of bad landlords. For his part, Swore thinks 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.