by JONATHAN YORK
Kyle’s assistant city manager was reporting to council on a proposal to adopt the latest international building codes.
But just when his listeners were getting ready for a long, dry piece of Monday night business, James Earp began talking about angry tenants.
“What brought this up,” he said, “are substandard properties that are being leased.”
“We’ve gone into rental properties who didn’t have electricity. The electricity was being ran from a neighbor. They didn’t have water. The water was being ran from a neighbor. The floors had rotted out. The toilet had fallen through.”
At least once he went from saying “what we have seen” to saying, “what I have seen personally.” And as if to foreshadow his message, one older man had spoken in the public comments about raw sewage backing into homes.
It was a strangely vivid introduction to an ordinance that took up 90 pages, most of it on what to do about shower lining, combustion air ducts and water hammers (if you know what those are). Of her time spent reading the proposal, Mayor Lucy Johnson said, “It was not one of the more exciting two hours of my life.”
For the council it was too much at once. “Honestly I think we need some time,” said David Wilson, the mayor pro tem, and a motion to table the measure passed 4-2.
Discussion was not through, however, before Earp could explain why he was dwelling on tenants’ rights: the new residential code would require an inspection whenever a one- or two-family rental unit went vacant.
“We are not in the business of condemning structures that have people living in them,” Earp said, even if the city doesn’t think they’re fit to live in. But checking out a building between tenants would give city building official Mario Perez an opportunity that he doesn’t have right now.
“I’ve been here over 10 years,” Perez said in an interview the next day. “I’ve seen rental properties that there is no floor when we go in. You can see the dirt. ... But these folks don’t want to say anything because they are paying a low rental rate.”
