AN ORDINANCE relating to housing and building maintenance, amending Seattle Municipal Code Sections 22.202.080, 22.206.020, 22.206.040, 22.206.050, 22.206.080, 22.206.090, 22.206.110, 22.206.130, 22.206.140, 22.206.160, 22.206.170, 22.214.050, and 22.214.086; and amending Ordinance 124011.
The report of the Planning and Zoning Committee Agenda Item six Council Bill 118 974 Relating to housing and building maintenance. Amending limits for code sections 22.220 2.0 8020 2.206.0 20.0 40.0 50.0 80.0. 90.1 ten 131 4161 7022 point 14.0 50 end point zero 86 antimony Ortiz 1240 11. The committee recommends the bill passed as amended. Councilmember Johnson, thank you. This is the rental registration and inspection ordinance and probably the reason why everybody else is still here with us this afternoon. I'm really proud of the progress we've made so far on improvements to the rental registration and inspection ordinance. The bill, as voted out of committee, made five changes. One of those changes was technical in nature, but the other four made some pretty significant differences. And I'd like to thank Councilmember Herbold for bringing those amendments forward. They incorporate references to requirements related to lead paint modify. The percentage of units selected for inspection requires inspection reports from private inspectors and amends requirements related to lead paint, carbon monoxide alarms, minimum fire and safety requirements, improving security standards and other technical corrections. We had asked for a little bit of additional time between the vote committee and the full council vote in order to better identify a range of issues within the checklist to better classify failures. One of those failures that we hear a lot from the private sector landlords are that tenants disable their own smoke detectors. It's one of the most common, if not the most common failure that we get in our rental registries and inspection ordinance. And obviously a very different type of failure than the kinds of failures that we heard during public comment, like very significant mold issues or other safety issues. So we were intending to try to identify a set of ways to respond to that checklist. We just didn't quite run run into enough time to be able to do that. So we did set up a pathway that allows the department through director's role to continue to work with community partners and landlords and others to identify a lot of issues identified by Washington can Columbia Legal Services and other folks during the public comment . So I believe this is a really good step forward and continues to provide important protections for the 50% plus of our city who rent for their housing and really look forward to seeing what the outcomes of that additional work by the department looks like and commit to our friends who are still here that we're going to continue to do work in this fall's budget in order to make sure that we're adequately funding the department to continue to do their work. Thank you. Thank you, Captain Johnson. I'm sure Councilmember Herbold has something similar. To Councilmember Herbold. Thank you. You're good. Now. A couple of minutes. Oh, yeah, a minute. 30 seconds. I just want to thank the community partners as well as landlords for sharing their concerns with my office and thank Councilmembers Johnson O'Brien for supporting the amendments that I move forward during committee. In particular, the creating criteria for requiring additional units for inspection, I thought was very important. DCI had the the administrative discretion to to do that and has had it for a number of years. But we keep hearing of buildings that fail their REO inspection, but that aren't getting the additional inspections of units prior to a decision being made of whether or not these buildings are actually passing, but they're failing individual inspections without having a trigger for inspecting the whole building. So this is really, I think, important in identifying not just the need to correct violations within individual buildings, but to make sure that that's not indicative of other problems in the building. In addition, the reduction of the amount of notice to property owners of units selected for inspection I think addresses another sort of problem that has been identified with this program since its inception, which is there's among some landlords, certainly not all. There is some gaming of the system when landlords know which units are going to be inspected and they have a lot of notice, they are able to go in, fix those those problems quickly so that there's no indication to the to the department that there may be a problem in the in the building. And then lastly, the request that inspectors leave information in the unit after completing an investigation I think is really important to increasing tenant knowledge. In a building of the conditions and in ways to address those conditions in the future. And then finally, there's a signal of this council's interest in the future to address the program fees in such a way that we can evaluate and address any imbalances in the fee structure for small landlords while continuing to set the fees to cover the cost of administering the program. Thank you. Catherine Herbert. Any further comments? Thank you very much. Please call the roll on the passage of the bill. Burgess. Gonzalez Herbal. Hi. Johnson. Suarez. O'Brien. Swan. I beg your president. Herald. Hi. Nine in favor and unopposed. The bill passed and chair of Senate. Please read Agenda number seven. You can read the short title, please.