 This is Davis Media Access again and we're here tonight with another episode of The City Considerers. My guests tonight are city council members, Lucas Farrex and Brett Lee. And we are here to revisit the proposed renters ordinance here in Davis. Welcome Lucas, welcome Brett. We, it was about a year ago, you guys were in here and we were talking about this and at the time it was an idea. And it was an idea that I remember you were very passionate about and some things have happened since so you're here to give us an update today. So do you want me to start? Yeah, go ahead and start off. So actually the council voted 5-0 last fall actually to go ahead and implement a renters ordinance. And so as some of the people may recall there were sort of three main components to it. Maybe Lucas wants to list off a couple and we can maybe give some examples of how that might actually help real world renters and landlords and also just general neighbors. Sure, let me back up one second too. We were at, I remember we talked about the things that were driving your concerns about this and it was a very low vacancy rate. The fact that there were a proportionally a pretty high number of single family rental dwellings in Davis, those sorts of things. So what's happened in the interim? So the ordinance is really three major components, excuse me. So the first is sort of an educational component. So there's going to be a city website that is dedicated to sort of renters rights and responsibilities and all those types of things. It also will be helpful for tenants but also for landlords and individuals and neighbors in the community as well too. But also there is a registration component to the ordinance and then also, what is our third component? The inspection, yeah, that's of course. So I think that we've got three major components. What we're at today though is that the city is in the process of hiring an individual to basically run this new program. And so that process is almost close to completion. We're almost ready to have that person in place to start to implement the new program. So happy to be more specific and give you more details but that's the sort of overall, yeah. So the person will be a part-time person and related to kind of the challenges that we face in the city of Davis with this very low vacancy rate and also very high proportion of first-time renters. The education component is supposed to address that. So we have somebody who's 20 years old and doesn't really know what their rights and responsibilities are and so we're formalizing the process a little more so that when people register their properties with the city and the registration fees are very modest. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of let's say $30 for a single family residential unit for the year and for apartment complexes per complex, the maximum is $100 for the entire complex for the year. So if we're 100 unit complex, that would basically work out to $1 per unit per year for the registration and the reason why there's, it's a fairly low registration expense is because the fees are aggregated and really once you put a website up, the fact that lots of people make use of it or we are gonna have a little kiosk at City Hall, once you put it up, the incremental cost of each additional unit isn't that much. And so first-time renter will come in and sort of better understand what their rights and responsibilities are and as Luke has mentioned, we want also a landlord component because as you kind of referenced in your opening, about a third of the single family homes in Davis, it's not apartment buildings, but single family homes are being rented out and a lot of those people are first-time landlords and relatively new at it and so there's also a lot of, there's a need for better education for the landlord component. And so people will be able to go and sort of better understand what their rights and responsibilities are and so that's a big important piece and we also, we have the Sacramento Housing Association which is a trade association for essentially apartment owners. They are gonna help with education component and they are very supportive of our ordinance because it's a fairly reasonable step. It sounds like education is really key to this and it's true. I remember moving out of the dorms, getting my first apartment here in town. I didn't know how to rent an apartment. I didn't know what I was responsible for. I didn't really know what to do when something broke. So there's all of that but as you said, first-time landlords or property managers. They may not also know that either. I do remember last year talking about there was gonna be a requirement that there had to be a responsible party within 50 miles instead of being an out-of-state landlord. And so has that been written into the process? Yes, and the idea, there is an exemption that somebody could petition to have somebody who's slightly farther away but that will require a specific request. But the default is that people need to be in the approximate area and they need to be available seven days a week, 24 hours a day to respond to emergency issues. Yeah, I think that's one of the real keys that right now in the city, we don't have, the city doesn't possess any kind of database and sort of a comprehensive database that where we know who owns what properties. So, and this is actually one of the benefits to neighbors, frankly, is that neighbors have, right now, they can go to the tenants of a house and say, I need to speak to your landlord or whatever, but that information is not necessarily readily available. So requiring each single family home that's a rental to be registered with the city will also help facilitate interactions with the neighbors as well too. Of course, in addition to tenants that may have needs, of course, and also if the city has needs to be in contact with the property owner. So, it's a really pretty positive sort of component to the ordinance. The thing I would mention is one of the reasons also that aside from the very low vacancy rate in Davis right now, almost basically zero vacancy rate, one of the other issues is that we're the only college town, university town in California that doesn't have some type of ordinance like this in place. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, so all the other UC towns do and then many other college towns in California and actually many communities in California have some sort of renters type ordinance in place, but particularly in terms of the college towns were the only one that didn't have something like this in place so. So you did have resources to help you kind of model our ordinance off of. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, our ordinance is modeled after a sort of amalgamation of a number of them, but including what's in place in Sacramento and Sacramento County as an example too, close by. What kind of feedback have you been getting both from, I know you've talked to a lot of renters, you've also, I imagine, talked to a lot of property managers and property holders. So a lot of the renters are pretty excited. We had a statement of support from the SCCD and we had a lot of students come down and say that they're really looking, that this is something that the town has needed for a while. And in general, we've had a lot of positive responses from people when they learn about the mediation component because right now there aren't mediation services available through the city to help diffuse some issues and one of the related to the education component is mediation services that we plan to offer. So that can be between roommates, right? Like, hey, you were supposed to pay electricity, I thought you did, and now there's some weird conflict going on and then there's between tenants and neighbors and tenants and landlords because right now the process has sort of the, in the current situation, in the current situation, you can go and you can, hey, Autumn, how are you having this issue? And if one of us just kind of folds our arms and goes, no, I'm not interested, the next level is really the legal level. That's how people end up in court. Right, it's basically small claims court. Small claims court and that's like a giant step from just trying to work it out to that level. And so the mediation is meant to just step in a little earlier than the process before things get too out of hand and really provide some guidance. And the mediators will be trained in tenant law, so they will not just be there to try to make people feel good, they'll be grounded in what the law is. Let me also, that component of the ordinance is actually, it's a great partnership between the city but also the Yolo Conflict Resolution Center, YCRC, a newer nonprofit here in Yolo County. It's made up of a lot of folks who've been involved in this type of work for many, many years but I think it's a real great, the city does not have the ability to sort of have this sort of in-house services be provided. So we're partnering with an existing nonprofit, Yolo Conflict Resolution Center, YCRC, to actually work on that component too, which so it's taking a nonprofit that's already sort of experts in their field and partnering with the city and getting them to good use. That's something I always like to hear about. In terms of the feedback from sort of landlords and property owners, initially there was a lot of concern. Right now there are no specific city regulations related to kind of the rental housing market. Most of those are done through health and safety regulations at the county level. We have some building code sort of regulations at the city level, the county level, and the state level but in terms of actually regulating the renter, kind of the landlord-renter relationship, there isn't anything. And as Luke has saluted to or specifically mentioned, all the other UC campuses, typically there's something there. So they were kind of used to not having to worry about it and so the initial reaction was great concern. But as they, we brought them into the process and sort of laid out what we were planning, the majority of them are fairly comfortable with it. And while they may prefer to just let not have them and just sort of leave it to them to work out the issues, most sort of came on board with understanding that this is a fairly reasonable step and it should still preserve their ability to operate their businesses in a professional manner. And so just to recap, property managers and landlords will pay a modest fee every year that will register them. Those fees will help fund this part-time position through the city. And then they also have access to things like mediation and education. So there's a clear benefit to them as well as renters. Exactly. And then there's one other piece that's related to single-family residential only and that's an inspection component. So apartment complexes are just purpose-built to be used as rentals. Whereas the person who takes their single-family home and rents it out to eight students, it's not really purpose-built for that. And so we heard a lot of anecdotal complaints and concerns about the condition of the rental property and was it really suitable? Or habitable. And so because of the very low vacancy rate, many people have talked to us about it. They're very, very concerned about complaining about living conditions. Sure, because then when they're, where are they gonna live? Right, so they don't wanna be troublemakers because then the landlord will kick them out and they'll just find somebody else who comes in and isn't interested in complaining. And you mentioned something, Brett, about a house with eight students. So how does this ordinance connect to or relate to or does it to the city's mini-dorm ordinance? Is it an ordinance? So we're working on a mini-dorm ordinance. The state, that's gonna be a fairly tricky one because the state has ruled that we can't limit the number of people who live in a home in what you would consider to be kind of a meaningful way. I think the requirement is that each person has like 45 square feet of living space. I mean it's very, very small. So if you think of a 2,000 square foot home or a 1,000 square foot home, literally you could put 20 people in before you hit the limits that the state has imposed. And understand, the state ruling was done for a reasonable, for a good reason in a sense. What you had is you had some people living in neighborhood and they didn't like the fact that, oh, somebody moved in and they have a big family or they had family, extended family and they were trying to limit sort of that. And you legitimately had a family of 12 people living in a house. Well, that should be allowed, right? And so they were trying to approach it from requiring a certain amount of square footage per person. So the state sort of responded by a fairly small amount. So in terms of the mini-dorm ordinance, we're still in the process of working on it. And I think the direction we're going on that will have to do with not so much limiting the number of people, but limiting the externalities to the neighborhood. So the house with 12 cars, the house with sort of violating some of the building code types of things. There's a lot more layers to that one, but I was curious how it connected to this. We actually have just a couple more minutes, so sort of final thoughts so we can wrap this up. Just one thing I would say is that also, one thing that was really important to the council when going through this process, and we unanimously agreed to this, was a regular check-ins. So this is a brand new ordinance for the city, brand new sort of proposal that we're setting up, program we're setting up. And so there is regular check-ins scheduled. So we will soon have this individual hired that will be running, administering the program for the city, and be very much a public face in terms of the city staff side of the equation. And then in about a year from now, we will have a check-in at the city council as sort of once we're, because the real key is we wanna actually gather a bunch of data over the course of the next year and make sure that we have a robust, not only database of the rental properties, but also see what types of complaints we're getting, see what types of also compliments as well too, hopefully. But we really wanna make sure that we wanna see that it's working, so. So does this have any additional path through council, any additional votes that need to happen on it, or it's a done deal? You're ready to hire? Yeah, the final vote was started in the fall and then the final vote was basically right around February 1st in that range. So it is now, the ordinance is in effect and we're just going through the hiring process, as we said, just to finalize that person, get the final pieces of the program in place. Local governance and action. We talked about this lesson a year ago and here it is and it's in place, so. Well, thanks for that. Thanks for coming in today and making time. I wanna remind viewers that the city of Davis has a website, cityofdavis.org. There's a link there for city council agendas. You can watch them streaming online. You can watch them on local Comcast channel 16 and they're archived and you can get all sorts of information you can get in touch with council members that way too. Thanks for tuning in. This is the city considers here at Davis Media Access.