Tenants gain voice on city code panel

Landlords won’t have quite the same clout on the city’s Code Enforcement Committee that oversees the crackdown on blight and other code violations involving property.
City councilors this week revised the committee’s membership to add a tenant representative to the panel, which already had a member looking out for landlords.
But instead of giving the tenant member the opportunity to vote, councilors opted to strip the voting power of the landlord representative, leaving both positions without a vote on decisions made by the committee.
City Councilor Craig Minor, who heads the Ordinance Committee, said that both the landlord and tenant members can discuss issues and raise new topics.
But since neither will have a vote, they won’t “complicate the actions of the committee.”
At the same time, councilors also added another voting member of the panel, the superintendent of the water department.
The new makeup of the committee includes the police chief, a code enforcement police officer, the zoning enforcement officer, the director of health, the fire marshal, the public works director, the chief building official and the water superintendent.
The revised law also says that “two city electors appointed by the mayor, one of whom represents the interests of property owners within the city and one of whom shall be a tenant” are to have non-voting roles in the committee.
The Code Enforcement Committee has been in the forefront of the city’s longtime effort to combat blight, improve the condition of rental housing and otherwise spruce up the community.
It brings up issues and violations of building, housing, health, zoning and other property-related codes. It also makes recommendations to the appropriate enforcers to seek compliance with the codes when it finds conditions that fall short of what the law mandates.

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