Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 18.30 establishing a Proactive Rental Housing Inspection Program, read and adopted as read.  (Citywide)
Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to the proactive rental housing inspection program read for the first time and laid over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading Citywide. I have a motion in a second by Gonzalez and Austin. Is there any public comment on the item? Okay. Please come forward, Mr. Shelton. All right. Good afternoon again. Gary Shelton, I guess it's evening now. I'm in support of the motion, but I thought you might appreciate hearing some public comment as to why. I don't imagine that it's not going to pass, but it's been a long time coming. You'll reading the back up material. The SB two was initially enacted in 2007, and that's a state law. It was known then as the anti NIMBY law and SB two is mentioned a number of times in the backup material related to this. In terms of it, the it demands in a sense that every city or jurisdiction that has a housing element include a number of items that had probably never been included before. And one of them as things wound down. What the city council back then decided to do in terms of the housing element was to actually not comply with SB two, to let it go on to another housing element sometime in the future. That was the 27 to 2013 version of the housing element. They have more detailed numbers, but that's what I call it, and that's what it was known by then. SB To ordained that there be by rights the possibility of building homeless shelters in every city and all the city had to do is determine what zone that would be allowed in, that there would not have to be a copy process. The city council actually put those sites in the port and in the villages at Cabrillo, and neither of those has proved to be an adequate. And now what I'm hoping that this event or this issue coming up before you today is opening the door for what at their review of the housing element, I believe it was in January or February earlier this year, staff said that they would work on that adjustment to the city's zoning ordinances to allow by right. Homeless shelters in certain industrial zones. That's a possible good fix for this. But I wanted to play a little bit of the groundwork about that and underscore the fact the city at that time couldn't manage compliance. Then the next housing element came along the 2013 to 2021 housing element in which we're working right now, and they still couldn't comply. So this motion that you're about to pass this evening is designed to, beyond the siting of homeless shelters, accommodate the siting of single resident or single room occupancy dwellings. And if you look at the R and R for R for an hour, for HD, an hour for you zoning areas. And I'll wrap this up in just a moment. Mr. Mayor. We actually got to wrap it up now. Okay. You'll see that there are areas in town where with a C up process, Saros can be built. That's brand new and good. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Gonzales. Yes. I want to reiterate my gratitude for everyone again, coming together to make this a a really, in my opinion, good ordinance, a step in the right direction for, uh, proactive rental housing inspection. I have a quick question as to number three in our recommendation from the previous council meeting. It seems broad, it says, to increase the frequency of administrative citations. I know we had suggested to come back or to increase the frequency of fines after 30 days and then thereafter 15 days. Is that language we can add in in section three? Just to make sure we're on item 16, not on 15. Just I want to make sure I, I don't know if Mr. Shelton was talking to 15, but. Mr. Mayor, members of the City Council, we are looking at the annotated version of the ordinance that was provided by the city attorney's office. And I do believe that we did increase the frequency of inspections. Uh. Charlie Mayor, members of the Council on adding subsection F Administration Citation Schedule. It does. If the owner fails to abate the violation within 30 days, the city inspector may issue an administrative citation every 15 days for each continuing violation. So I believe we did address your concern. Apologies. I may have missed it. There it is. Okay, great. I swear I read this like three times and I may have missed it. Second question in relation to number three as well is I know we've also discussed accelerating the issue if it is an imminent danger to life or safety or health to the city prosecutor's office . Maybe I'm missing it again. Is there language that specifically mentions that? Yes, ma'am. It's actually in that same paragraph that if it is noted that the violation poses an imminent threat to the health and safety of the occupants, the city inspector will notify the owner of the violation and will notify the city prosecutor's office of the violation within 24 hours of the inspection, as we did include that simultaneously as well. Great. Thank you. And then I just want to make sure we're still on track. I know we had talked about 60 days coming back on three on a few things. So the duplexes triplexes information as well as publicizing the the bad landlords the worst of the worst list that we have put together of about ten landlords, is that correct? That's correct. We did talk about 60 days. I had asked for 90 days, and I thought that the council had agreed to that. So we were hoping it would be 90 days. If it's 60, we can we can endeavor to get that as well. Can we come back in 60 days? If needed more time, then go from there? Sure. We can certainly do that. Yep. And also the $75,000 as well. Was that going to be included in that 60 day report? It will be, yes. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. There is a motion in a second. We've done more public comment. Okay. We closed public comment on this item. You're for 16, not for 15. Correct. Okay. Come forward. We have to do a public comment at once. Typically so. Go ahead. Thank you very much for letting us have a chance to talk to you about this. My name is Sanford Simmons and we own some property in Long Beach. And I believe I've been owning property here for about 45, 50 years. And we always comply with inspectors. Inspectors come by and he says, a little paint chip over here and there's a screen here that's got a little crack in it and this and that. Or if a tenant doesn't want to pay their rent, they call the city and complain. And we take care of all the issues and meet with the inspector. I think we already have enough rules on the books. I don't know what the problem is. Do you have another problem here? That there's somebody here is not the landlords aren't doing what they're supposed to do. There's not enough already things on the books to enforce it. What is this going on? And then I read a little bit here, there that you guys want. Whoever you guys are, want to have the tenant put the money into it like an escrow account where the tenant has control, you know, or whatever. The city has control. The landlord doesn't have the money to do what they have to do to do to pay their bills. Something's wrong here. I was over in India and over in India. The buildings are all rundown and dilapidated. Why? They have what's called rent control there. Yes, they have rent control there and the landlord doesn't have any money to do anything. The people inside the very well because we have a very low rent. I don't want to see this city going to rent control. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hi, my name is Matthew Simmons, and I just wanted to reiterate the comments that were just made. It's I think we do have enough rules on the books and it's just a matter of enforcing what we have. I think it's a very slippery slope as soon as you know, soon as it just seems that the momentum and a lot of property owners and are concerned that Long Beach is moving in the direction of rent control. And this is not. The last stop. This is the first stop. And and I just feel that if we continue in this direction, it actually we're going to have the opposite effect. We're going to have unintended consequences. And I know the intentions are good, but ultimately, if landlords are if the funds are kept from the landlords, ultimately they're not going to have the ability to to make the property nicer. In fact, I just had some tenants who are in a property that who lived there before purchased the property and and there are gang members. There were I was getting calls from employers saying you need to, you know, get rid of these tenants. And I was able to give them a 30 day notice or actually a 60 day notice. And and they moved along their way. And if there's if landlords do not have the same rights over their property to do what they need to do to help people move on, if they're not treating the property nicely, then it's going to have the opposite effect. So just want to I think it's in everybody's best interest to keep, you know, property is a is a fundamental right and and I and it makes sense for landlords to keep their properties nice because they earn more money. So the slumlords, you know, nobody's for them. And, and, and I think we have the laws in place to have them move along their way. But I also feel that 90% or 99% of the people who will be affected by this are not the slumlords. It's everybody who's trying to do a good job trying to provide nice housing to the community. And I think those are the people who will be adversely affected. So thank you. Thank you. Your next speaker, please. Good evening, mayor and council members. I wasn't planning on speaking tonight, but I did want to reiterate that on behalf of the Apartment Association. It's a pleasure for us to work with. You, Mayor, and the council members meeting with you and having an open dialog. We're very supportive of the ordinance, were supportive of future endeavors where we can collaborate together with housing Long Beach if the opportunity arises and Josh and everybody else can get along with me and everybody else in the apartment association side. But I think the open dialog that we've at least initiated is a first start. I want to commend Councilwoman Lina Gonzales for adding the motions that she did. I think strengthen the ordinance is very important. The apartment association's behind that 100%. We don't want to have slumlords in our city. I don't think anybody else does either. So I appreciate what you all are doing and concur that we move his audience forward tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Josh Butler, executive director of housing Long Beach. And in a rare moment here, I'm going to just concur with Mr. Murchison and say that we look forward to working with him and the apartment association as well, and thank the council for strengthening this ordinance. I think we have work to do, but this is a really good start and thank you all very much. That is a very rare moment, but I like these moments. Okay. I'm going to go back to Councilman Gonzales and we're going to go for a vote. Public speaking is closed. Councilman Gonzales. I just want to clarify where this is, proactive rental housing inspection. And so I know we took up discussing rent escrow. So city staff. Real quick, just to clarify, can you go over that just a bit as to just real quickly as to what we're doing now versus what was mentioned with. Few Councils Council meetings back. So we provided an. Analysis of a program and what. Other cities do in terms. Of proactive code enforcement. And it was our conclusion that most cities in the state of California, with the exception of Los Angeles, rely on the proactive rental housing inspection programs to resolve the majority of their issues. We did do a cost analysis of the cost of a rent escrow account, and staff felt that it was very prohibitive . We presented to the City Council just the proactive rental housing inspection program to codify our existing requirements under state law and then actually to augment those state requirements with local mandates that you, as the City Council directed us and approved a couple of weeks ago. Do you want to go into more of this? Thank you. And I just want to clarify, you know, this ordinance that we're taking up as its first hearing is a proactive, proactive rental housing inspection. And so the added amendments will be for the worst of the worst landlords. And I think we can all agree here, we don't want slumlords in our in our city. And so both the apartment association housing Long Beach many other on the renter side on the property owners side we all want the same thing and I'll continue reiterating that is that these protections are after, I should say these amendments are for the worst of the worst. And so I just need to say that once again so we can really understand that. So thank you very much. Yes, ma'am. You are correct. As I said, this codifies state law. But but locally we are adding to the basic standards under state law to reflect the local needs. And so we do believe it goes far beyond what state law requires. You're correct. Thank you, Councilmember Andrews. Yes, thank you. I'm here. I also like to echo that sentiments with that councilwoman. But also, Mr. Murchison, I really want to thank you for working with us and your organization, because we know that the percentage of the slumlords are very, very, you know, few because we have so many other, you know, land owners, you know, and they they are working to make sure that we live in a safe and clean environment. And I really want to applaud every one of you, you know, home owners, land owners, to let people know that they do have that right. And this is why I think that you do such a good job. But those ones, you really have that compassion for the ones who stand in your on your property. Thank you, all of you, again, for working with us. Thank you. We have a motion and a second. Please cast your votes. Motion carry seven zero. Thank you. We're now going to go ahead and go back to the regular agenda. So I think we're on item 12.