Good afternoon. It's March 3rd. We're here for a planning housing and parks committee work session. We have a couple items on our agenda for today and we're going to begin with FY 26 capital budget and amendments, the FY 25 to 30 CIP, housing opportunities, commission, the HSCs requested two amendments to the FY 25 Capital Improvements Program related to Elizabeth House Demolition Project and CITER-MILL Capital Improvements Project. I'm going to turn it over to Council Staff, Mr. Ambinder, and we can call up our guests for housing opportunities commission, who I are here and anybody from the executive branch is appropriate. Let me turn it over to you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Two HAC projects are noted in the county executives recommended, amended FY 25 to 30 CIP as the chair noted. One of those projects is an additional $1.5 million that HSC has identified a need for in FY25 for the existing Elizabeth House demolition project. And the other project is $2.3 million in FY25 for Cider Mill capital improvements. Both of these projects would be funded by current revenue and so the county executive has deferred recommendations on these projects and will consider funding as part of the FY 26 operating budget process. I'm happy to go into some additional details about these projects, but we'll say up top since there is no affirmative recommendation at this time from the county executive. and since the funding for these projects would be current revenue, Council staff's recommendation is to defer formal consideration of these items until there is a recommendation from the county executive and HSC would be available to answer any questions that the committee has at this time I'm happy to go into some of the details regarding these projects or to turn it over to HSC for opening comments. Let's hear from HAC for opening comments. Wanna welcome, we have Council Member Lutke here who is very interested in CIDER Mill in particular. Welcome to her to join the committee. Why don't we turn it over to HAC and then you can walk through from the council staff perspective if there's anything to add. Thank you and good afternoon, council members. It's great to see you all for the record. I'm Chelsea Andrews. I'm the president of HLC. I'm joined with a number of my colleagues, our budget officer Terry Fowler, as well as our CFO Tim Getzinger. The two requests that are before you are Elizabeth House demolition, just to provide additional context. As you all know, Elizabeth House is a former public housing site where we were successful in relocating residents throughout the county, but also at the beautiful legged. It's a senior development that was actually one of our first developments. And in moving forward with the demolition, we encountered some unexpected additional expenses related to environmental repairs or remediation needed to ensure that the demolition was conducted in a safe manner. As a result, we incurred an additional $1.5 million of expenses unexpected and we are working in tandem with our county counterparts at DGS in terms of an interim beautification approach for that site. Of course, it is the interest to the scratch and and believe that for a nominal cost that particular site could be modified to be more ADA accessible for residents who park in the parking garage and need to enter into the scratch as well as of course just ensuring that the site is not just been stalled while we wait a number of years before we start redevelopment project there. We have yet to receive confirmation in regards to funding for the demolition cost, the additional demolition costs, and their ongoing discussions in regards to the beautification, both of which should occur in our opinion because obviously this is a hallmark site for the county and ensuring that we take care of it in an appropriate way is what we're seeking support on. Related to Cider Mill and thank you so much for being here Councilmember Luki. I also believe that our tenant representative is in the room as well. This is a site that HLC has definitely dedicated a tremendous amount of unexpected resources towards in terms of security measures, in terms of capital improvements. But our return on investment is extremely valuable. This is our largest site, over 860 residents reside at Cider Mill, and security has been stabilized. We believe and will continue to be. And that is in tandem and work in partnership with our county police department representatives as well who have been wonderful partners. What we are requesting support for relates to both security expenses that increase lighting and additional security equipment as well as the balconies as CIDERMIL. As you may know, there are balconies on a number of the property residential units there that have had to be partitioned off. They're not safe for use and our health and safety hazard and also have the potential of inspection-cold violations which are very costly. And so we are trying our best. We've expended as provided in the materials previously over $7 million of capital improvements since we've acquired this property. And we wanted to continue to thrive and be a resource. Occupancy is improving and security is stabilizing and we want this site to be a safe place for our residents. And with that, I will open for any questions. Great. Let me turn it back if council staff has any more context to add and then I'll open up to colleagues on the committee and to council member Luky if there are specific questions. Thank you nothing else to add at this time. Great anything from committee colleagues? Councilmember Luke? Lucky me, lucky me. So I just I just wanted to thank you all for the work that you've done in collaboration with with our six district with, and I know we've just had a changing of commanders, so I want to thank Commander Stancliffe for his work while he was there. And I look forward to trying to set up some time for my office and HOC and Commander Dillman to come and meet with the Tenants Association and the greater sort of advocates community there because things have gone tremendously well since these different interventions have been put in place. And I just wanted to know if you could speak to the, you mentioned the health, there's a health and safety issue with the balconies, which I 100% agree. But could you be more specific about what the issue is with the balconies presently? So why that is, you know, for example, a top priority right now to remediate immediately. Well, the balconies have to be partitioned off because they're not safe for any of our residents to stand on them. They're not stabilized or secure. There are challenges at the site where concrete has fallen from the balconies. Obviously, the county does ongoing inspections of CIDERMIL and it is an area where we are subjected to negative points for our inspections. We are trying to move beyond a troubled asset here in this property and additional resources are needed to actually accomplish that and this is one of of them. Okay, and so I, you know, and I know we've had a good collaborative relationship to where when things are arising, we're able to discuss those. So I know that this request is very targeted with things that need to be dealt with presently and under our current physical budget, but look forward to being able to chat with you further and work with our tenants on sort of ongoing things because that seems to be the best way that we've had with problem solving in a positive direction. So thank you again and obviously I certainly support this request. Appreciate it. Safety issues related to balcony seems very serious to me and we talk a lot about leading by the power of our example in the public sector and not just the example of our power and being a landlord in this case that is actually taking care of property and ensuring safety seems to be at the top priority. Let me turn it to Councilmember Dawando. I have some questions. Good to see you. Thank you, for all your work. Yeah, and I know we'll take this up as part of the operating budget, but good to get a briefing on it now. As you know, we passed legislation here around guards for windows. There's another example of our commitment to safety. So looking forward to taking that up. Since we have you here, and we won't't see you again probably until budget, I just wanted to, is there anything related to changes at HUD, at the federal level, staffing there, if changes in the way funding's flowing, that's impacting you already, that you're anticipating or preparing for, just thought I'd take the opportunity since you're here. Well, of course, just like all of our peers across the nation, we are...the level of anxiety is high as it pertains to all of the potential implications with regards to HUD. You will know, of course, we are the agency that's responsible for administering the voucher program. If there are shortfalls in regards to the voucher program, there will be a direct correlation for our agency. We are hopeful that won't be the case because in the past that has not been the case, but the past is not necessarily a preview of what the future will hold. About 45% of our funding overall as an agency comes from federal funding. Primarily for the voucher program there are other funding grants that we receive our fatherhood initiative as well as the work we do with our continuum of care, the homelessness work that we do. And our hope is that that even if the funding is allocated that there won't be a delay in terms of being able to process our monthly drawdowns, that in of itself is a challenge that we all are nervous about. I will just give a plug and say that our Housing Production Fund and the way that HLC has traditionally approached our housing model has insulated us a great deal in comparison to our colleagues. We don't have public housing in its truest sense and therefore we're not as reliant on administrative funds or federal funds for our multi-family developments. But the voucher program in which we have over 9,000 residents could be implicated, excuse me, if there is a reduction in federal voucher funding. I appreciate that, Jan, I'm glad you brought up the Housing Production Fund and we another example of why it's good when we take leadership here and and put in our own money but obviously 9,000 current residents and many many more thousands waiting for these vouchers so we don't want to see those cuts and I appreciate you underscoring not only the if the funding is there but the administration that the staffing could impact the drawdown in the ministry. So we just got to keep an eye on all that. Obviously we don't control it, but thank you for putting it out there and keep us, I know you'll keep us updated. The other, you know, not direct, but obviously would have an impact is tariffs in the cost of the cost of construction that could potentially be implicated. Of course, Canada is the producer of lumber and those costs going up would be and have a significant impact on us and many other construction costs. So we're closely monitoring that as well and then of course we're dealing as many others are in regards to how banks are approaching risk at this time as it pertains to loans and underwriting. And so just really closely monitoring all of these different potentials and definitely look forward to working with you all and keeping you apprised of how we are trying our best to think proactively around it and where we may need your support. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Appreciate it. Vouchers, we need an expansion of vouchers at the federal level. There was hard work to try to move in that direction and the challenge now that we're talking about the opposite of not just not expanding the voucher program, which is in many ways in dire straits based on the need versus the capacity, but that we're potentially talking about the opposite of moving and retreating from that program is just really one of the many very troubling things that are happening currently that we need to be focused on. I did speaking to this particular discussion related to Elizabeth Square. What conversations between Housing Opportunities Commission and the Executive Branch have happened related to that demolition? What coordination has happened? I know originally it was an agreed shared cost model. It's a shared cost project. Where does that stand? What are the expectations for covering the increased scope as identified by the contractor as we now know it dating back to last summer and heading into now. Our office has been in communication with DGS. At one time we thought that DGS's budget would include this additional 1.5 million. It did not and so we're trying to work with DGS in terms of what this should look like moving forward. And so they're just ongoing discussions as you know, the county executive's budget has recommended waiting until it has an opportunity to evaluate its final recommendations. But as it stands, we've had to advance the funds for the full cost for the environmental mediations and our seeking support in regards to that this demolition doesn't have an income stream. And therefore, just seeking support as well as wanting, of course, to advance what DGS has proposed in terms of what that intermediary approach would be for the space. I, IETA OMB, just to add to that point, the initial $3 million that we did get for Elizabeth House had a sharing, the county paid half of the $3 million and HOC is responsible for the other half. We exploring all kinds of options that you'll have, you'll be privy to once the March 15 budget comes across to council. Good, for this additional cost. Yes. And this what, and is the expectation that it will be located in the DGS budget and the HLC budget, or is that still to be? It will be in HLC's budget. It will be, yes, because it's the Elizabeth House the Militian Project, which is part of H.O.C. budget, or is that still to be? It will be an H.O.C. budget. It will be, yes, because it's the Elizabeth House demolition project, which is part of H.O.C. C.I.P. OK. Got it. And both H.O.C. and DGS agree on the need and the timing for the demolition? Well, I would, at this juncture, we've gone too far to turn back now. The request to even begin demolition at the time we did came from the county. We weren't pursuing demolition until we had a plan for redevelopment, but of course, at the same time we were building the scrap. So we were of course responsive to the request and here we are. My hope is that we are able to get alignment in regards to the cost as well as the interim use of the space or it will have a fence around it, which I believe is not what anyone would want until we're able to secure funding for making this space. An open green space, it doesn't have to turn into a full, blown, brand new park, but definitely space where the community members can have additional ingress in egress as well as ensuring that there is additional measures put in place for ADA. And that's what was advised and was recommended by DGS to HLC. Appreciate it. We eagerly await what comes out on March 14th. I think it's going to be now in the budget. I will will say one, the request came from the county, and so I do think there is an obligation for the county to fulfill our end of the bargain. We shouldn't be asking partners to do things, and then not following through on funding commitments that go along with them. And obviously having a fence or not following through on the ADA accessibility is not a reasonable option here. So we need to figure out how to move forward and how to be partners both on the HSE and county government side to move this forward. This is a public-private partnership that we have been touting and celebrating and so we need to make sure that we're doing it the right way, and that we're continuing to follow through on everything that everybody is so excited about. So, appreciate that. There is no action or decision point. This is really an update to be prepared as we head down the road. It's a CIP item that is likely going to be operating budget funded with current revenue is what we're expecting. And so we just wanted to make sure that we had the appropriate context as part of our capital budget review, but won't be making any decisions until the operating budget discussion. So with that, thank you to our- Hi, I'm in consideration. Our guest from H.O.C. and from the executive branch and for your work and we look forward to continued Partnership as we work through and navigate both of those important projects for our community and we're going to invite up Department of housing and community affairs for the next part of our agenda. And I believe they have a presentation that is going to get queued up here. We'll invite up Mr. Mia from Council Staff. And we're going to get an update on rent stabilization and an update on trouble property and code enforcement and we have a presentation that is getting prepared and at some point, D H C A is going to join us at the table. I'll note we also have Council Member Mink who's joined us for the conversation as well along with our committees. We have the presentation and we are ready. Good afternoon, Councilmembers. Thank you very much for the invitation to this oversight hearing on the progress we've made on setting up and getting the rent stabilization program running. I'd like to introduce the folks from DHCA who have accompanied me and myself formally for the record. My name is Scott Bruton. I'm the director of the Department of Housing and Community Affairs. Immediately to my left is Nathan Bovel, who is the division chief for the community development division, which includes code enforcement. Next to him is Tamela Robinson, who is the manager of our code enforcement program to my right is Paveena Melvin. She is the manager for the Office of Rents Stabilization or our new Rents Stabilization Program to her right is Shrine Wilkerson, who's the program manager for the Office of Rents Stabilization and to the far right is Zachary Patton, who is our new division chief for the Rental Housing Division which accompanies the Office of Rents Stabilization and the Office of Landlord Tentative Affairs. Okay, so we have the presentation up. Would you all like me to just go ahead and get started? Please do. Okay, wonderful. Thank you very much. So I'll give you a brief overview of what we're going to cover. I'll give a short overview of rent stabilization. Don't worry, I'm not going to go into the whole program. We will go into some dates and other information detailing the rent stabilization program progress that we've made. We've got a variety of facts and figures, which include a range pre-submitted to us by Council staff and we've got our best to provide hard data on those. And then because it ties in directly to some of the questions that you all have asked, we have in response to your questions, we have information you requested about the trouble of an at-risk properties program and then we will end up with an update for you on the proposed amendments to the troubled property regulation because as when we were initially working together to set up the rent stabilization law and then the regulations that followed a year on from that. There were certain things that didn't quite fit right. This happens with all new big programs. And so we did our best working with the Office of the County Attorney to come up with regulations, changes amendments to the regulations that would help improve the interaction between the part of the rent stabilization law that provides new restrictions for being a trouble to rat risk property and the existing trouble to rat risk property law and Okay, so moving on, some information you all probably are curious about. First, the allowable rent increase. The annual rent increase is the lesser of the consumer price index for urban wage earners, plus 3 or 6 percent. The current increase allowance is 6 percent. So the CPIU for FY26, so this coming year once we change in July, is 2.7. Therefore the annual rate increase allowance will be 5.7 percent down a little bit from the current fiscal year as of July 1st, 2025. I won't go into, unless you'd like me to allowable. Well, I can say a little bit. The allowable rent increases that landlords have may only be implemented when signing a new lease or lease renewal. Multi-year leases must have the same rent for the entire lease term. Landlords, though, may bank unused rent increase allowances for future increases. So if they decide to not increase to the maximum allowable, they are able to bank that for future years. And then trouble the net risk properties, as I was referring to before, may not, landlords of, may not increase rent by any amount if they are designated as trouble to land risk. As you all know from working on the law, the executive regulation limits the amount charge for certain fees and allows an increase of CPIU for fees that are allowed. And land lowers may also charge for unregulated optional services that tend to voluntarily enroll in. We could talk more about that if you'd like later. And then I should also add though it's not on the official presentation that we do also in the law have options for extraordinary increases behind the in addition to that yearly amount or instead of an exemptions. So we do have a capital improvement petition which allows for renecresses beyond the norm to make sure that landlords can make capital improvements if they'd like. We have the fair return application which if you're not making a fair return based on the formula and the regulation, you can ask for an extraordinary rent, one time extraordinary rent increase to get you to that point of a fair return. And then we also have this substantial renovation exemption for a landlord that spends, I think is more than 40% of the value of the property, making significant renovations. And then those would give you another 23 years of exemption as if you had constructed a new property. Next page. The next page shows basic timeline. The rent stabilization law was passed July 20th, 2023. Our Office of Rinse Stabilization staff, as promised, joined almost all of them joined in March 2024. A couple of them joined at the very beginning of April 2024. And that includes eight FTEs for the Office of Rinse Stabilization, as well as a senior IT specialist that resides in our IT group, our internal IT group, that does the majority of the IT work for Rinse Stabilization and is working directly with tabs in setting up and iteratively improving our new rental housing portal. And we'll come to that in a little bit as far as details on that. And then the folks who joined us for the Office of Rents Stabilization were incredibly helpful in our run up to setting up the Rents Stabilization regulations. They did a ton of research as well as that bolstered the things we've done on fees and a variety of other things. Also setting up our standard operating procedures, coming up with forms that needed to be done before we went live because you don't want to hire people and then go live the next day because I'm not going to work very well. So then Rinse Stabilization Regulations,, regulation was passed on July 23rd, 2024. By September 16th, we, the new rental housing portal went live and the rental housing portal partially deals with Rinse Stabilization because that's the way that you, through the portal, you submit capital improvement to petitions, fair return applications, substantial renovation, exemptions, but also that's we've set up a system that will be, we are slowly acclimating landlords to participating in that provides, sort of like algorithms and automated ways that they can go in and insert their new rents. And it will tell them what is their allowable new rent. If they decide not to do the full thing, it will tell them what amount of banked rent they have and that will carry over year to year. So we're tracking that for them, especially if you sell a property, you don't have to rely on somebody's record keeping to me to you, the government's tracking that for you. And it also provides them with information on what you can charge on fees. So in a way, it can be kind of daunting and complicated to comply with new government laws and regulations and we've tried our best to automate that as much as possible and to provide little pop-ups to explain what the maximums are, little calculators, to let them know what's going on with that. And then obviously we have the human folks who can answer their questions and help them through the process. And then our first petition was received, first of those petitions that I mentioned or applications was received on November 6th, then I'll have some more information further along in the presentation on that. So that was about five months into, you know, since the regulations went live. So we've got some facts and figures for you on the next slide. So Ms. Melvin and Ms. Wilkerson have been our major, taken on the major roles in outreach to explain the new law and regulation to tenants and landlords and just stakeholders in general. They've held a range of events, 15 of them virtual, five on-site with a total of 831 attendees. That was the initial rollout and some follow-up. We're going to be doing another surge of those as we've tried to focus on getting landlords to, you know, educated about the basics. And now we're going to move on to educating them about the more nitty-gritty of compliance. So this will be the education will be an ongoing process for us and the outreach that goes with it. So far, we've issued 10 citations for noncompliance, and that has resulted in $5,000 in collected fees. The rental housing portal. Now, again, this is something we're growing into. This is not something we expected. All landlords have signed up on day one. And so far, we've had 453 properties registered for the rental housing portal. And we've had of that, 453, that total or comprises 8,299 total units. And so it's not too bad given that landlords were only able to start, excuse me, signing up through the portal in October. So we're doing okay so far, and part of our continuing educational outreach will be about helping them go through the process of complying with the law, but also recognizing the benefits they'll get for their management company or for themselves if they're self-managed in using the portal to track all these things. You all had asked about that or the council staff, had asked about FTEs. The current staffing level includes a manager, a program manager, both of whom are here today and investigator, four program specialists and admin specialist and the senior IT specialist, I mentioned that works in in our IT group, but focuses on rent stabilization. So we filled nine positions. We have them filled right away and we have zero vacant positions. Let's see. Accomplishments. Go through a list of accomplishments for the Office of Rents Stabilization, they have developed quickly standard operating procedures. They've also developed petition application forms, which was iterative. We put out a first round. We received feedback from the industry because you know, any kind of complicated form, you're always, there's always going to be things that you miss or you don't think about. And in working with the industry, they had some really good questions, really good things to point out, and that we iteratively change those. And we will continue to do that going forward, as we find, you know, like a better way to put together these petition forms to make it easier for landlords to comply with. We will go ahead and do that. when I was doing more work on NDC, one of the things that was a bit of consternation in the industry is that these types of applications and forms would be in existence for many years without change. And it would take a lot of work to try to, you know, you'd have to come to a paradigm shift kind of thing to get changes done. And we really believe in making iterative changes, you know, within the realm of they all have to comply with the law and regulation. So, as I mentioned, we also created knowledge-based articles, which were required to do for 3-1-1 to help with informing the public. We launched the rental housing portal as I mentioned on September 16, 2024. We assisted with the rental housing portal development through testing and feedback based on the program's needs. We sent a lot of our staff in to try to break it. You know, like kind of do accidental things, try to, you know, like to maliciously try to mess with it. Always have to do that kind of testing. We developed an alleged violation form in procedures for tenants and landlord complaints that the Office of Rent Stabilization works on adjudicating. We created an internal service request, master worksheet in lieu of off-the-stabilization database. So every time we get a service request from a landlord or the public, we track those. We're required to track those to, you know, see how quickly we, when we get them in, how quickly we deal with them, what is our success rate, but it also tracks what are we hearing about. And so there's feedback for us. If we're hearing the same thing over and over again, that shows that we need to make some tweaks to what's going on or fix things. We've updated the rent stabilization portion of the landlord of Harris' handbook to include, because rent stabilization wasn't there. Now it's a whole new big section. And we've moved in general from every year to printing out the new Landlord Tenet handbook to trying to move mostly to being online so we can update it on a regular basis. But we're trying to be sensitive, because I'm very much tried up, don't kill trees. But we recognize there are some situations, especially older residents or people who have limited access to the Internet who might benefit from the printed versions and so we're trying to work with community advocates to figure out a strategy for saving on printing and trying to mostly use the Internet. We've created informational brochures and presentations which we will be, if they're not already, we haven't already put them up there, we're going to be putting them all up on the Office of Ritstabilization webpage part of it so that we can point people to these resources when they call 3-1-1 or they call us. And it's kind of already in the can stuff if we go out to do a presentation. And we've created a sample RIN increase notice for the regulated units. So we'll be notifying landlords about that and providing that information for landlords to use in sharing with tenants. Okay, more facts and figures on the next page. Regulated first is exempt, this is in response to another one of staff questions from staff. Currently of the 98,000 approximately licensed rental units in the county, we estimate that about 57,000, 58 or 58% are currently subject to rent stabilization. the 27,000 properties in the rental properties in the county. Seven. are currently subject to rent stabilization. Of the 27,000 properties in the rental properties in the county, 7,289 or 26% are currently subject to rent stabilization. Now this is with the caveat that there are exemptions included that it is difficult to parse with these broad numbers because for example, units built before 2002, we can figure that in. MPDUs and ADUs, we can figure those in. It's a little more difficult on the things like religious institution or someone who only owns two or fewer units to quantify those. And so we'll be working iteratively to try to improve our data to get at those exemptions instead of the rougher figures that we have now. But these are pretty good estimates. Let's see. Next slide. For the next five years, you all had asked about properties coming under rent stabilization. Over the next five years, over 3,700 exempt units will become regulated based on that 23-year timeline, with nearly half of these transitioning to regulated status next year. And this all depends on when these buildings were built. I mean, you will see kind of ebbs and flows of these things, where there was a kind of, for example, in the general area, there was not much building during the 80s, less building, you know, like not much building in the 90s, building started to ramp up in the 2000s, so you're kind of seeing some of that here, and then there was a great procession, so you know, dropped off, and so it will kind of ebb and flow over time. I have, I'm guessing you won't want me to read through all the numbers, but we have the numbers listed there for units built in 2003, 4567. And so those units built in 2003, they'll come under rinse stabilization in 2026. And with that, 2026 as of January 1st. Oh, and if you're curious, all of this data, one of the things we forgot to put the little sourcing under our tables, all this data comes from DHCA licensing regulation data as well as state s data. Okay, more on regulated versus exempt, more than 70% of units in multifamily apartment buildings are are rent-regulated. Only 24% of rental units in single-family or townhouse or two to four unit buildings are rent-regulated. This is to be expected because of the exemptions that we have. Units in multi-family apartment buildings represent over 88% of all regulated units. And we have there the breakdown of exempt and regulated in total by those different categories that I just mentioned. I'll leave you to look over those. We're happy to do follow-up, answer follow-up questions. But I know we'll get a little numbing to read through each of the cells. So facts and figures on service requests. From July 23rd, 2024 through February 22nd, 2025, the Office of Rents Stabilization responded to a total of 546 service requests. most common topic fell under general questions about rent stabilization with 286 service requests accounting for or 52% of the total. Office of rent stabilization maintained an average service level agreement completion rate of 95.8% across all topics. So that's what we report to Office of Management and Budget and County Statues, they track these statistics for us. And you can see the table there to the side. In addition to the general questions, we also had the highest next question was the amount of allowable increase. That's to be expected. I rise curious what the new one's going to be. And when we do, there's going to be a press release coming up where we'll let everybody know how we do the voluntary rent agreement press release. Sorry, voluntary rent guidelines, press release each year will do the same thing with this. and we'll have the press release as well as social media drive traffic to our website where we'll have that information posted as well as you know who you can call for more information, things like that. The second most common was questions about fees, and then last was request for information about the portal, about the new rental housing portal. How to integrate with that, how to get information, for how to comply with it. The next page in the presentation, we have, as I mentioned before, we have one petition we've received so far, and that was a fair return petition for a single family unit. And so this one was a bit unique and it was quite complicated. And... Plina, would you like to kind of give an overview of it, or would you like it too? Sure. So it was a townhouse and thank you. It was a townhouse in Pulseville and the derivations after the Tenhamuvden, they had a tenant, conservatively since 2013, and they never raised the rent for the tenant. The Tenhamuvden in September 30th, once they moved out, they did capital improvements, and then they filled out a fair return. So the issue with that, we originally, after we looked through the documents, we denied application because most of the expenses were due to capital improvement. And for our regulation, before you complete capital improvements, you have to apply and be approved for the search urge. But also after we did the denial, they contacted us and pointed out that they did not increase the rent for nine years since 2013 to 2024. And we do have a section of regulation that states that we can change the base year income level. And we did recalculations based on that fact and based on that section of the regulation. So we calculated what they could have been increasing for. So at the end, we did end up approving them, but we did not take into consideration any of the capital improvements expenses. We only took into consideration operational expenses because for fair return we're only looking at the operational expenses. So based on the expenses that were provided, the revenue we did approve them and it was a total of 50.924%. So the original amount that they were charging since 2013 was 1,400 they're approved for 2112 94. I should add that when we consider the petitions as when we look at new laws or new regulations, we consult with the Office of the County Attorney to make sure, you know, like because anytime we get a novel situation,, we ask them what their interpretation of the laws because obviously we're not lawyers. And so the initial denial was approved based on the interpretation of the Office of the County Attorney and then the change based on looking at it at a different way was also approved by the Office of the County Attorney. And so I will say as the dates in here indicate the turnaround between denial and ultimate approval was about, let's see, a little over a month. So it was a quick turnaround in getting this figured out and getting this fixed. And they did, and there was a lot of back and forth conversation with the property owner. It wasn't just kind of receive it, silence, and then here's your decision. As we talked about in the council sessions on setting the law and the regulation, we will be in dialogue with landlords and help them try to make their best case. And, you know, if they are, you know, like if their application fits what the requirements are, then we want to help them navigate that as best we can. If it doesn't fit, then by helping them navigate the process, they will also better understand why it doesn't fit, and why the application was designed. Okay, so we're going to move into the troubled properties. Before we do that, why don't we open up to questions on this, and then we'll move on to trouble properties properties and it could be a little bit clear and easier because they're related but slightly different topics. So let me open up. I do have a couple of questions. Well, I'm going to open up to colleagues if they have any first. Let me go to Councilman for Funnigan's Ones and then Councilman for Druwanda. Thank you. Does this work? Yeah, okay. Thank you so much for the presentation. The detailed presentation, I love seeing all the data that you guys put together. It makes it easier to really understand what's happening on the ground. For this last case, as you mentioned, did the property owner want something higher than the 50% increase that you allowed? so I can understand this. They were aiming for 2300. Okay, so almost there. Yeah, so they were aiming for 2300. It's hard to get a lot of data from Pulseville because there are very few rentals. There are no apartment buildings, there are no condes and there are very few rentals. Yeah. data was data was slim. But the couple of townhouses they saw, it was between 23 and 24 hundred dollars and that's what they were aiming for. Were they just going to, maybe this is a question off the record, but this is right here. Were they pleased with that or were they, we have not heard from them. We sent them the approval last week. And last week? Yeah. So it was official approved. Well, internally we approved it. And then we had to complete the approval package. We had to put into the details our analysis, our formula, how we came to it, list all of the facts that we considered, what it not considered. So the official approval was sent on Friday. So I'm sure we'll hear from them this week. Okay, okay, it was the first one. So I'm sure that you guys are going to improve timing and everything as you move forward. That was just my quick question. And I appreciate all the input and all the information that you guys can constantly give out. And must you me many of these info is also in Spanish at the very least, right? We, we're working on translation. We have some forms to read, translated. We have our brochures translated. We're working on getting our presentations translated. We have our alleged violation form, which is a complaint form in both English and Spanish, and currently the forms, the application forms are in English only. So we're been editing those. All, like Scott said, we initially rolled them out, but after getting feedback, we've been working on mending them. So once we get the final versions, then we'll be translating them. And was it time frame for getting all that translated? What do you think you're going to be done with this? We're done with forms, so it's whatever timeline the translating service is going to give us. We don't have the capacity to do that in-house, so we rely on the centralized. We do our website, as I think most county websites, has the ability to switch over to Google Translator. Yeah that was that's not good. Yeah some of this has to be translated to Spanish and can you please let us know when that's done and when it's going to be your next town hall meeting announcing this in Spanish because I want to be there and I want to make sure that we advertise this okay thank you that's it. Thank you. That's all. Thank you, Councillor Droner. Thank you. Appreciate the presentation. Just a couple questions. The I was fumbling around on the website here and trying to figure out if I'm a resident who thinks I'm sub that I'm protected by the law or where do I go to make a complaint? So currently we ask everybody to go through MC311 because we want to have the data registered. We do have our internal mailbox, just the intake mailbox, anybody can email us, but usually we're receiving all the service requests through MC311. Okay, and you said the reason for that is what? We want to make sure we have all the data recorded, so whenever somebody is reaching out to office and restabilization, we have it recorded. We just don't have a database right now. part of an imperative in the executive branch that MC311 is supposed to be the entry point for all questions. And then thereby, it's through MC311 that OMB and county stat track how quickly we respond, the types of questions and everything. We do have, as Ms. Melvin said, an office of rent stabilization intake email. And so that is another way that people can get to us directly. But we are really supposed to, as an executive branch, encourage people to go through three lines. Get back. Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, I just think we've talked a lot about the portal for the landlords and the trainings, and that's great, because we want to have, it's a lot of education to be done, and make sure people understand what they're required to do. I think we need to spend a little more time on the, how do you get, if you're just regular, renter X, you know, even the 311, while I know what that is, and I encourage people to use it, and we want as a county to encourage people to use it, I do think if you type in which civilization and get to your page, I should be able to easily navigate and complain right there, and you can't right now. I mean, I've been doing it for about 10 minutes. So we can definitely improve on that. And just to let you know, of those community outreach events, several were designed or focused on tenants. And then we've all been- That was going to be my second question, like, what was the split there? Yeah, and we important on both sides. We've also done Renter's Alliance has their monthly town halls Miss Movin was workers and have Participated and I don't know if it's several getting on several of those go ahead. Yeah, so we as Excuse me a has mentioned, renters alliance holds a number of town halls that we've spoken at. Also, hip, the housing initiatives partnership, they do regular tenant info sessions where they speak about rent stabilization as well. So they we have our CBOs have done a lot of the kind of tenant facing stuff. Community, excuse me, community building organizations have done a lot of the tenant facing outreach and we have done as well in some of the, we had a few webinars in the beginning of the rollout. And as Scott mentioned, excuse me, Dr. Bruton mentioned, we will, we're doing a spring rollout where we plan to continue to lean on these CBOs to do the tenant outreach and explore other avenues to make sure we get like a greater outreach. We're looking towards looking what other communities we need to outreach to, hip does, does or is planning to do sessions in Spanish as well. That's part of what their terms are. So reaching that population, but also looking and see what other communities within the county need targeted outreach as well. And we are for the community-based organizations that we have contracts with. We're gonna be providing them training and we're gonna be providing them with the, you know, like PowerPoints and brochures, materials that they can hand out. Yeah. And again, this is just because we're first time doing this. We're, you know, year in. This is just constructive feedback. Again, I'm on your page for instabilization. I control find for 311. The only places it says 311 are at the bottom of the county page, where it says call through like the general banner, not related to this. and it doesn't say anything about if you complain it's not in here. It says nowhere in here. It's a lot of good information in here like you know what the guidelines are on every but if you have a complaint there's nowhere it nowhere does it say call 311 to register your complaint. And we could have that to tell you what we can work with our IT folks and other person who updates our website. Yeah, I appreciate that. I just think it should be big, like, just first principles here. Like we're trying to, there's a lot of units covered. We want to make sure if like you type in Rinse Labitation, that's the first thing you see. If you're a landlord, you need all your information. If you're a renter, you need all your information. And here's how I say, I think I'm subject to this. So not just that, that could be one thing, but I think we'm subject to this. So not just that, that could be one thing but I think we need we need some robust upgrading of that piece because one of my concerns as I've always said with this law is if tree falls in the forest, if you don't know you have the protection it's no good to you and so you have to we have to continually be in this business particularly as we bring on new properties and because it's new of finding new and innovative ways to do our region. I know you're working hard and you're building the team and all that. I'm just trying to say I think there's some improvement that can be happened here. Absolutely. And we can have the, in addition to the translation that Councilman Fernandez-Ezel Stone. Next week, we can have the complaints or questions focused on tenants, part updated on our website, and then we can work iteratively on improving the other things focused on tenants. But getting that most crucial thing done, we can get that done working with Ms. Mentra by next week. The website, a website revamp is a part of our spring outreach plan to make it, like you said, to make it more user friendly and a little cleaner. So that is something we have. But as Dr. Bruton said, we can do the 3-1-1 that add a banner for that. That's a simple fix for now and then we can discuss the larger options. Awesome. Yeah, there's a million things you can do. Obviously, you can enter in your property here if you're lent. you want to be able to see if your property is covered and all that stuff. But yeah, that's great. Appreciate it. and enter in your property here if you're lent, you wanna be able to see if your property's covered and all that stuff, so. But yeah, that's great, appreciate that. The other question I had for right now, if you could just tease out the fact, if we go to that fax and figure page, I think I understand if I wanna make sure everyone else understands the fa facts and the regulated versus exempt page yet another one the one before that one I think. Where it says 98,000 58 percent. The difference between okay of the 98,000 license for 57,000 or 50% are subject to insolvenization then the next bullet is 20 of the 27,000 properties, just the distinguishing, if you could just tease out the distinguishing, the license rental uses versus the difference between those two numbers. So the basic difference between the two numbers is licensed unit versus properties. And then the relationship to, I guess, so the unit is the is the unit the property is the property so presumably some of those 98,000 are within the 27,000 properties yes all that's encompassed right so so good and they can be anywhere from we have a Rinse Stabilized property that is has 1100 units and we have others that are a single unit like the one that the petition. We did, we can if you'd like, provide you a breakdown of, I think we provided council, we provided chair Freedson's, one of his staff members with a list, an itemized list of all the properties that are coming under rent stabilization in the next great years. And he said he was gonna distribute it to the rest of the PHP committee. We can make sure that that gets distributed. But then we can also put together, take a little more time, because it's a lot longer, but we can you an item I'd list of the properties and their number of units. Yeah, the first thing for sure, you since you already have that have be great. I think the other one would be helpful as we go forward just so we can distinguish. Yeah, that's it. I think these are good to have from time to time. So I'm glad we're doing it and good to know that there's only been one fair return and and that it was after some back and forth. It was a great, you know, you figured it out and it was fair. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Appreciate I wasn't aware of a distribution situation. I think we just got it on Friday, but we can we can Friday afternoon, but we'll follow up on that based on what was received. I only heard about it verbally. I didn't even get it in writing from our team as of this morning. So just to be clear, that literally just came in based on a request that we had based on a question that came into us leading up to this conversation. Few follow-ups. What's the timing of the press release? You mentioned the 5.7 percent. You mentioned the press release was going out but didn't mention timing. Sorry, quick. And now it's just on the phone with us more as we're leaving. We have everything ready to go this week. Yeah, we have it ready to go. We're just working on timing with CEX because the increase is not until July. And so we're trying to figure out what's the best time. But we need to let folks know. So rent increases need to go out 90 days in advance. And so we need to kind of count back from that. And that's why we prepared it so much ahead of time. We just need to decide does he want next week, the week after the week after that. We need to have it go out well in advance of that initial 90 days because of like the kind of cascading deadlines. But I would suggest earlier is better. I don't think information is negative here and if there is a point in time in which you think people have forgotten what you originally sent you can always send another one But I don't think you lose Anything by sending information out. I don't think that's negative to landlords and I don't think that's negative to tenants. The reason we wanted to separate it is the VRG, the voluntary right. I'm not sure about today. When you know went out today and we didn't want them to go out at the same time because there might be some confusion and so hence separating them by a few weeks you know kind of separates them in people's minds. Okay and remind us what the VRG went out with. 3.3. Thank you. Yeah, I was like, yeah. 3.3. Yeah. And so it's 3.3. Just 3.3. Yeah. And we've got that. We've already got that up on our website. And the, I think sooner is better. I understand the confusion, but, you know, I think they're going to be out there at some point at the same time. There's going to be two numbers. And so I think we have two different numbers for two different reasons. And you'll have to navigate that, but I don't think the timing personally is part of the challenge there. And I think getting the information out as soon as possible will be helpful. Okay. You've already shared it here. So if you're going to add to the confusion, you've already done it. So you might as well get it out to as many heat balls possible for those who don't spend their Monday afternoons listening to Planing Housing and Parks Committee work sessions in real time. Okay. Well, that's helpful. If you could follow up with us and let us know specifically what the timing on that is going to be. So we know, I think that's going to cause 3-1-1. It's going to cause your office and it's going to cause our offices to receive feedback on that. Positive and negative feedback and just generate questions understandably. And so being prepared for that to the extent that we can on both the council side and the executive side I think would be helpful Speaking to the specific dynamic that you mentioned the last part of your presentation the poolsville property I'm just Would like to dig in a little bit more to better understand the special circumstances you talked about how they you know first came in with one type of petition. They were essentially conflating the operating expenses. That wasn't something that you thought was permissible under the law. You didn't have the flexibility to provide that level of leeway. You went back and looked at it based on the operating expenses, but also based on essentially banked rent is what you reference. And I just want to specifically understand what specifically was the 51% increase based off of to get to the $2,112.94. So like I said, it would be bank rent, except that there was no bank rent at the time because there is no restabilization. But the way we did the calculations, we took the $1400 and then we put the allowable increase rules on top of the $1400, even though there was no restabilization. So we took the CPI plus three, no more than 6% and we did that for each year of the missed increase except for the three years when you could only increase by VRG due to call it so we could only apply the VRG because that was what all the loans were limited to for 2020 2021 and 2022 and then the rest of the years were calculated based on the CPI for those years plus 3%, no more than 6%. So that's how it was. So you essentially recreated what would have been a banked rent dynamic, just to be clear, because I wasn't explicitly shared. So I just want to make sure that it's understood. It's a circumstance. I'm not sure it's a unique circumstance, because I imagine there are other properties where rent for a long period of time has not been raised with a long time tenant and then the tenant moves out and there's quite a bit of improvements that need to occur and a property on the rest of the side, you know, what to do. And so now there's a model for what they can understand. You'll base it off of. You'll base it off of essentially backing into the bank to rent of what it would have been in essentially recreating the base year, even though it was well before the rent stabilization will went into effect. Correct. That's the formula that we've played with numbers a little bit. We tried to see what would work best and applying the rest of the stabilization laws to this case made the most sense because if there was rest of the stabilization, that's how they would have been increasing, except for those three years. Okay. And clearly the idea here is that will be how you handle these similar circumstances in the future. Right. So the section does list several examples. So if it was a long term employee that was living in the unit, or if it was, I believe there were four or five different, so there is, but they're all the same where the rent was not increased for some period of time, either due to the family member employee unit. They just did not increase rent for five plus years. So this is how we'll be applying for the future cases. Yeah. And in a way, every application is, I mean, I saw this in DC. Every application is unique because every property, you know, like large or small, is going to have a unique history of when they did improvements, when they did improvements, when they decided to do rent increases. Did they have family or employees working there and you get that in small and large buildings? And so it's pretty complex to go through, even if it's a small property. It's pretty complex to go through these, but it's important to develop standards that, as you see more and more applications, you'll be able to provide better general guidance. I would suggest, in this case, if there are future cases like this, that you give even more detail and post it on the website, you know, on the FAQs, that people can really understand, you know, this is the circumstances, is exactly how you handled it, show each year what the year was, and you know, how it went up over time, and you know, basically show your work. Because, you know, I think that would be helpful for people to really understand, I mean, how did you get to 51% over that period of time and how is a similar circumstance? As long as we're not. We wouldn't. Yeah, of course, of course. It should say just a general property owner in a general part of the county, or you don't even have to include the general part of the county. You can just say the building type, if you want. I don't think don't think, you know, it being in Poolsville, Versailles being in another place is relevant, except for you to explain that it was complicated because there aren't that many rental units in that particular part of the county to look at comparable rents, for instance. I mean, that's the reason I presume based on what you shared of why that was included. Other than I don't think there's a particularly relevant aspect of the location, but I do think it would be helpful for folks to understand both parties involved here to understand that. So thank you for that. Okay. Talk a little bit about the next five years and the 23-year exemption and what will come online. We have gotten a number of questions about what is the trigger for the 23-year exemption and what will come online. We have gotten a number of questions about what is the trigger for the 23-year exemption and whether it's using S-DAT, which creates a January 1 timeline or whether it's the use and occupancy, which would be more directly aligned with the offered for rent language in the bill. You've chosen to do SDAC. Could you just talk through that and explain that because we've gotten quite a few questions. On this, the idea being that if something is offered for rent in the fall, if it's offered for rent December 1st, it's a difference of almost a year. And it really hasn't been offered for rent for 23 years at that point. But you picked one standard, there's other standards you could have picked because you just talk through that a little bit. So we can understand it. We get all the data that we have in our licensing, comes from as that. do not store the certificates of occupancy for every single building that's built in the Goma County I know presently we collect the certificates of occupancy for the new build buildings when they register with the licensing but Generally speaking all the data that we have in the license comes from as that and as that only list year built So so we're we're limited by past practices of data collection Is that fair to say yes? So do we not have the ability to obtain the use and occupancy for buildings that are only 23 years old I mean I I understand if they were built like in the 40s, these are the 50s. I mean, I could see how the documentation is just challenging to find, but it's hard for me to believe that it wouldn't be easy to obtain for a 23-year-old property. That's not that old. We can check again. So we talked withitting services and we talked with the county attorney and trying to come up with what the standard would be. But we would have to see if permitting services was able to uncover that information because they're the ones who issue those. We don't. Why just be interested in know what the availability of that would be? I mean, I understand your point of this is what we have in our system, so that's what we're using. There's an understandable concern that's come in to say, you know, the bill language said offered for rent for less than 23 years. It hasn't been offered for rent for less than 23 years based on an December 1st, you you know, standard across the board dynamic, you know, very few properties start on January 1st, excuse me, exactly and be helpful to know what the capacity would be and if that is even available. If it's not available, that's a different dynamic and that's a different response. If it is available, then I think at least warrants conversation. Do you think we can probably get you something in writing within two weeks? Because we have to check with permitting services in OCA. And sometimes they have other priorities that they need to take care of. But I think we could probably get you something in writing within a couple of weeks, is that OK? Couple weeks sounds great. Thank you. That's all all the questions that I had on this item and I see Councillor Rarimink has a question, so I'm gonna turn it over to her. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that some information that has been discussed around how much any difficulty is absolutely, how many groups there are, please, that's it. Is that information that is available or is likely to be part of the one-second repression or that is going to be a problem? Yes. So we will be publishing the announcement in the next couple of weeks. So there's the announcement that then there's also like the location specific information and correct means I misunderstood, is it possible for landlords to be able to look up their particular property and then based on their own location and the age, etc. But there's information available to them that basically are here so that you, this property, is allowed to do's there there's nothing location specific in this but the rental housing portal does have landlords claim their property and so they're able to go in and look on a unit by unit basis and they're able to see for you know unit 1a this is the you know the allowable allowable, it's going to be 5.7 this coming year. I can raise based on the 5.7%. I can raise this amount on this unit, and then if I'm charging and here are the allowable fees that are allowed to be charged, and here is the allowable CPI increase that I can take on those fees. OK. And then is there a do we envision a future in which tenants would be able to do a similar thing? Oh, yeah. This is not. This is open to tenants as well. So a landlord has to have a sign in to go in and change anything. But a tenant can go and look up their particular building and see. Since we don't have, you know, we only have a certain percentage of landlord signed up, they'll be like a kind of a lag. But if you go in on the page, we will have notification, it'll be like, you know, the for, you know, this date to this date, the maximum allowable increase is 5.7 percent or up until July 1st, the maximum allow increases 6 percent. And then we have information in there on which fees is a landlord able to charge and what are the increases on those fees that they're able to charge. And when we were going through the initial statistical information about what we've done, there was a notice of how many citations that we've filed. And so we've already had complaints being filed from tenants saying that my landlord increased my rent above the allowable amount. We always engage with the landlord, correct me if I'm wrong on this, we always engage with the landlord and inform them because they may not have known or it may be a new management company employee, they may not have known and give them the chance to correct it. And we only do a citation after the landlord has said no, we are not going to, you know, to correct it. And we only do a citation after the landlord has said, no, we are not going to correct this. Okay, great. And then so that's information that tenants are able to access online currently? Through e-properties. Yeah, through e-property. Yeah, and as councilmember Joano said, we can do a lot to improve upon the ease of figuring these things out. And so, as Ms. Wilkerson said, with the spring refresh that we're going to be doing on the website, sorry, on the webpage, this devoted to rent stabilization and on the rental housing portal, we'll be doing that. And just to let you all know, we are very close with tips in finishing the phase one development of the rental housing portal. And we are now preparing to start work with them on the phase two. And the phase one was about getting the essential structures up there. And phase two is about adding improved finer green functionality to help both landlords and tenants, things that were not absolutely required at launch, but things that will help us. And is your expectation on the portal to have that for those properties landlords and tenants subject to rent stabilization specifically or to all landlords and tenants related to license rental property? Whole license rental properties. Eventually, what's iteratively going to be developed is we have different silo databases for licensing and registration. We have a different silo for code enforcement and for, you know, now the rental housing portal and as well as our affordability restricted properties that we track and deal with asset management for. Eventually, they're going to be combined in one unified back end database, which should help automate enforcement more and also help with landlords having more information about their own properties, but also tenants being able to see the interaction between all of these different things. But that's a heavy lift because we've got decades of these siloed things. And so that's one of the parts of phase two that we're going to be working on with tips. Got it. Sorry. Councillor Rominc, did you have any other question, Seth? I appreciate that. I would say as long as we're if you're able to do that kind of temporary placeholder upgrade that my President Joanna was mentioning in regards to like do this to file a complaint. If there's an easy link that can be added, that's also like do this and find out if your, you know, if we're writing a cruise to Jessica is compliant, just to kind of spot check out if there's a way people can do it on that, that would be great. And that is also a frequent inquiry that we get. And yeah, we said we'll do a little on, but that's something that they can just easily be looking up online. And we can just have that on the website, maybe, page to tie this over to us for about a big break, also. We might even be able to, we can check with tabs in our own IT folks to see if you know like a very clearly tenant section if we could have a little calculator for them like put in your current rent and this you know then it'll just compute what this is the allowable new rent between these dates. Right that will be nice. Thank you. Council Vice President Joano. Thank you very much just I meant to ask this the first time, but I got distracted with my website, Rabbit Hole. You have the citations issued, but kind of in bet, you know, a step before that would be the complaints that have come in. Like what's the number of complaints that have come in? Is that in here? Did I miss that? I didn't see it. No, we don't have the number of complaints. Do you all have that number? Because it would be within the number of SRs. So. So it depends on how you look at complaints. So we have the service requests. That was 546 service requests. And so service requests are sometimes just for general information. That looks like that could be information or it could be a whole bunch of things. We have a way to quantify the difference between seeking information and registering a complaint. Yes, we have that data. Okay, we can provide that. Would you like us to give you a little bit more? Yeah, well, I think it's important that a metric. You have a lot of other things here. Just to know, and it gets to my earlier point about the information, like people being aware. I think it's a metric that we should be tracking to see one, how prevalent is it to knowing that it's only complaint, it's mostly complaint-based, and then just how many we're getting. And then you said you had to get to, because I don't have, I'm not able to understand now, so you issue 10 citations, which means there were 10 cases in which you had a complaint or found out about an increase, someone refused to adjust it and you had to issue a citation. And then you collected $5,000 total. I also don't know, is that are they're outstanding? Have people ignored it? Have you had to go to court? Like, you know, I just think there's, there should be a to look how and I think it all initiates from the complaint right so how many complaints do we have how many got to the level of being resolved like it someone didn't know you informed them it was resolved and then get down to this number I think of like people said no and then you had to get fines so I think just understanding that a little more, you can send it in writing and be fine. Yeah, I think what we can do is some of the additional information that all of you have asked for, that's quantifiable information, what we can do is we can produce an augmented version of this presentation so that it's not just kind of sending to one of you and we can resubmit back to all of you and... Yeah, please send it to everybody. And then for the things where it's more of a narrative approach, we can probably just, we'll try to incorporate all the answers into an augment and presentation that way you have it all in one place. Because if you remember when we were talking, it used to be that the Office of Landlord Tenant would be the recipient of complaints of my rent is too high and then you'd try to negotiate in the old process, right? And we're not even just the old process because I'm assuming you could get a complaint. I'm in a building that's 20 years old, not subject to the law and my rent went up, you know, 20% or whatever. And in that case, we don't, it's not subject, you have to explain that. You would still, I would assume attempt to negotiate or work with the landlord as you did previously, is that correct? Right, yeah. And there's crosstalk between office of rent stabilization and office of landlord tentative fares because as you were just saying, issues may come to one that really kind of belong with the other and so we try to, you know, make sure to transfer those and work those out so they don't fall through the holes. Awesome. All right. Thank you. Mr. Wilkins. So for this number, so this would be the number of total complaints as well as the number of complaints that have led to an investigation and citation. And that will result. Okay. We want good, bad, innately. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Okay great, let's move on then to trouble properties at risk properties and the responses that you have. So... All right, thank you. Okay, great. Let's move on then to trouble properties at risk properties and the responses that you have. So this first section, dealing with trouble properties, our answers to questions received from Council staff. So I'll just go through them as, as I can guess. How many properties resolved all complaints between the first inspection and the re-inspection. So as of now, one property has successfully addressed and resolved all violations noted during the initial inspection and first re-inspection. It is important to note that the number of re-inspections required can vary based on the properties total unit count and the total number of violations identified during the initial inspection. For properties with a larger number of units and a higher volume of citations, an initial inspection may take more than one day because lower severity violations are afforded a longer time to cure while higher severity violations are given a shorter time to cure. So you may have an emergency health and safety thing that you have 24 hours to cure. You may have another one that is a lesser violation and it's 30 days. And so we may be going back for those different violations multiple different times. And for the larger properties while we try to get the reinspections all done in one day, sometimes it requires going back on consecutive days because they're so huge. So what is the current number of active inspectors? There are currently 37 full-time inspectors, two of whom are on extended leave. How many vacant positions? There are no current vacant positions. Mr. Robinson and Mr. Bovel have done an excellent job in catching up with all of this, making and getting everybody, all the positions filled. Let's see, next one. What is the number of properties currently designated trouble-door at risk? In fiscal year 2024, this is the report that we issued in August. There were 93 properties classified as troubled. Notably, 39 of these trouble-properties were designated as troubled due to noncompliance, meaning they hadn't fixed the things from the past. Three of those 39 subsequently became incompliance, leaving a current number of 90 properties designated as troubled. Additionally, there were a total of 101 at-risk properties, which includes the 67 properties that were previous identified as at-risk in the prior fiscal year. So there is a carryover. This deals with the transition from the old system to the new. Under the old system, there were no consequences. And at-risk properties just kind of stayed that way for usually two years until we re-inspected again. But now as we're transitioning into where there are significant consequences, as you'll see when we get to the regulations, we are transitioning to how we do the inspections so that a property that's designated trouble or at risk if they are motivated and want to become compliant again that we provide them with the quickest means possible in order to have that corrective action because not only does it help the landlord because they can raise their rents but it also significantly helps the tenant because that means the violations that got the landlord designated as such will be fixed sooner. Let's see, how many troubled and at-risk properties have requested reinspections and how many are presently pending? Presently, 11 properties have requested earlier inspection dates to expedite their property ratings. those properties have been fully inspected. Two are awaiting the assignment of an inspection date and four properties has successfully secured appointments and are scheduled for inspection. Next, how many trouble and at-risk properties have resolved all violations and are waiting on annual inspections after complying. Currently 52 of the 101 at-risk properties identified in fiscal year 24 or a waiting inspection after fulfilling all compliance requirements. Fulfilling all compliance requirements means that they have corrected all violations identified during their fiscal year inspection. 37 of the 90 current trouble properties identified in fiscal year 24 are pending inspection. Let's see. Next one. Next question. How is the department prioritizing the order of inspections? And this goes back to questions that you all had asked me during previous sessions for the law and for the regulation. While code enforcement, the code enforcement multi-family team is dedicated to conducting multi-family inspections, this team is also supported by inspectors from other teams to facilitate inspections at larger properties. So we can turn out, you know, a significant number of people to inspect, you know, a thousand unit building. Two multifamily inspectors remain available to address emergency and health and safety issues and to conduct mandated inspections. The inspection prioritization is as follows. Number one, emergency cases. There's always get top priority because there's the most risk. Two, at risk properties that have cured all violations in order to, in the order requested are received, that requests are received and then at risk properties scheduled for inspection. The third in the order prioritization are troubled property inspections that are already scheduled for the fiscal year. However, once they submit their corrective action plans and two quarters of service requirements, we will attempt to schedule inspections sooner. And so just to note, at risk properties have fewer compliance responsibilities to than trouble properties. And we'll get more into that in a second. Fourth are compliant properties that are due for inspection. And those come up for inspection every three years. Five currently inspections are scheduled through the last week of April for requested inspections. However, if a property cancels an inspection within a week of the 72 hour window required for tenant notice, we will try to accommodate any requested inspections sooner. And then should I go straight into the proposed amendments? Or would you like to pause there for questions on those? We could pause here for questions then you could speak to the the Reagan proposed amendments. So one of the 11 that have requested re inspections has been, has completely gone through the process and has been taken off the trouble property list. So I'll defer to Mr. Bookman. Just want to dig into, there are a lot of numbers that were just thrown out there. So I just want to kind of dig in and understand this. So Mr. Bookman and Mr. Robinson can provide more detail on those inspections. Good afternoon. So one of those. That's right. One of the properties since July 1st, the fiscal year, there's only one property that have corrected all violations and after their initial inspection. Okay, so one of the 90. Correct. And then there are 11 properties that have requested essentially for DHCA code inspectors to come back to say, we think we've solved all the problems. We want you to come back and clear us. What's the status of those? How long have those been pending? How long will it take to get somebody out there? Because it's in everybody's interest to get code inspectors to go back to confirm so that the landlord can move forward. And so that tenants know that their property is safe and that the government has done its regulatory job to make sure that we have safe, habitable housing. It's in nobody's interest for this to be a pending, ongoing, outstanding issue. Property owners don't want to be on the trouble, property lists. Tennis don't want to live in unsafe housing. And we don't want to be in a situation where nobody knows the difference. That we don't have the code inspectors going in to confirm and verify. So out of the 11 properties we've already inspected five and we're waiting for their ratings and then two of them are waiting for assignment which means they've been created and their inspectors are working it out with the property owner to actually confirm the inspection and the other ones are already scheduled so it's been confirmed. And how long does that process take or how long is that taking? Once they requested it, are you asking like for a request at once? But once the- Of the 11. I mean I think the 11 is the easiest for us to focus on because these are folks who at least believe at least think that they have resolved the issue. That's why they've gone back and said can you you come back and reinspect? Most people don't ask code inspectors to come back to their property unless they believe that they've resolved the issues and they want them to come back and confirm that they could get off the trouble properties. Now, there is an incentive for them to do that because they can't increase the rents to recoup some of their costs unless and until they are taken off the trouble property less and they can't get taken off the trouble property less, unless and until the code inspector clears them to say that they've resolved the code violation. So there are requested inspections. We got a lot of the requested inspections prior to them completing everything that they needed to complete. So Kays team was in communication with them saying, hey, we need your corrective action plan or we need you to cure all these violations. Once that happened, we then put them in order in which they were received. And so typically it's taking, you know, it could take, we're in, they could, they were to request today. It's, we're already scheduled through the end of April. So they would go on the next slot. Okay, so today is beginning a March. That would be the end of April, so it's basically 60 days. Unless they, unless a properly cancels inspection, and then we, you know, within that 72 hour window, we can say we have an opening if they're ready. Okay, so they get put on the queue, which is basically a 60 day queue, just so we're clear here. And they would essentially get put on like a waiting list for a cancellation where they'd have 72 hour notice so they could allow the tenant to receive the proper notice for a non-emergency situation for the tenant to know that an inspector is going to show up in their home and check on a variety of items. Is it possible just for the 11 to just have a, you know, it's not that big of a group to have kind of a timeline of where each of those 11 stand, you don't have to tell us the exact property name or, you know, address unless you want to. I don't feel strongly one way or the other, but just to know here are 11 properties. Here's, you know, when they were put on the trouble property list, here's when the inspection occurred. Here's when the request, here's the re-ens- you know, just kind of the basic timeline for those 11. I mean, if it was 100, I would say that's probably too many to reasonably ask you to do in a timely manner, but 11 seems like a doable universe to cut back. I think go back and get the dates when they requested and when the inspection occurred or when it's going to occur. That would be helpful. So if you could return that to the community as part of our follow up, I think that would be helpful. and then the 60 days is the general of what we're operating or I think it'd be helpful for us to have a clear picture of those 11 of you know how we got to the 60 days. Great. Okay I think that's all the questions I have on this. Let me turn to Councilmember, Councilmember George Wanda. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate the update. Obviously, we want it. We want this to happen as quickly as possible because these are people's homes that aren't habitable. And, you know, as I've said before, like, you know, my part where I used to live inal Bacteris is always on this list. And it troubles me that it's still on the list. So what if we don't, you're gonna go through the regulation because that's part of the reason we were trying to ramp things up to get people to do more. We had also talked about it previous sessions over the years. Just when this list comes out and what is done with it and how it's publicized and how people are notified, have you changed anything? And I'm sorry, I should be looking at you. Have you changed anything in that process based on those conversations and how does that feed into the regulations, for example. I have suggested in the past that there be like a press release and a press conference and it be really public that you've been on this list and hasn't changed because we need to do every tool available to make sure people have habitable homes. So if you could talk a little bit about that. Absolutely, Good afternoon. Nathan will avail the division chief for community development. We heard you lied and clear last time we were here and we talked about the availability of how people find out if a property is troubled or not. We're very cumbersome to go to Estad and look there. So it's prominent on our website now. So I would invite you to the DHA banner. There is a ribbon that scrolls across the top and one of those I think six or seven banners is the trouble property list. You can actually click that report and you can not only see the trouble property report for this year, the most recent fiscal year, but you can also look at the trouble property report for prior fiscal years. I think it's also important to note when you talk about how properties being on the trouble list repeated times, prior to the implementation of the rent stabilization law, there was no real incentive for them to do anything to come off the list. There were no consequences for being on the list other than they had to be inspected every year which can be cumbersome especially for the larger landlords. But for the smaller ones, it didn't really matter. So now there are consequences. People are starting to pay attention more to the list. We've made the list available so that residents and anyone else can easily find it. And Tamela's team have always done a very diligent job of going back. And even in the past, when there weren't serious consequences, they still had the responsibility to go back, keep inspecting those properties until those violations were cured. If they didn't cure the violations, you know, citations were issued, they'd go to court. And there are some properties that, you know, she's in court with now for failing to comply with correcting the violations of inspections that were done last year. Do you mind if I add something real quick? Certainly. Regarding the tenants finding out if their property is troubled, the rental housing portal has a link so that if the property is troubled, if the tenant looks up their own unit in their property, it will show that it is a trouble to rat risk property. And one of the things that we're, remember I talked about that kind of back end database sharing of information to help with enforcement, eventually we'll get to the point where, I mean, right now a landlord's, if it's marked as troubled or at risk, they are not able to go into the portal and increase the rent. And so the more we integrate these things, the more we'll have, you know, like kind of automatic enforcement or notification. In that obviously, you have to be registered in the portal for that to apply. And where obviously that's why we've gotta get as many people registered as possible. Absolutely. How many cases are in court right now? I don't have the exact number, but I can get that for you. It does, is it? Oh, yeah. It's hundreds. We're in court. We still have that backlog. And so what the court system has done is allowed it two days per month we used to be in court once. The last Tuesday of the month, and then we're in court, the third and the fourth Tuesday of the month to try to get back. And that's just for the troubled property. Not just for trouble, for all citations. For all citations, OK. But that's, I'd be curious on all, but I'm just asking for the troubled. for the troubled, how many of this list are you in court? Do you have a ballpark? I can say approximately 10 to 15. OK. Is that correct? Yeah. Got it. It's up. OK. Ms. Robinson, is it about six months like after a citation to actually get in front of the court? And that's for any kind of citation. If a landlord doesn't remedy it and refuses to pay the fine, then it's six months before we get the talk in court. And then it goes on after that and can last a long time. Yeah, and obviously that's a not your fault, nothing, but obviously if something's not habitable, and then obviously people have to stay, but at least now there's the stick of, well you can't raise the rent if you're on the list. We're also at the mercy of the court in terms of how much of that fine the landlord will have to pay. So the judge makes that decision. We often will ask for full fines, but the judge will often reduce fines, especially if somewhere between the date that the citation was issued and the court date, the landlord has remedied that violation. The judge may say, well, it's fixed now, so we're going to either lessen or dismiss those fines. It's sort of the judges not to over generalize, but the judges tend to look at it as an incentive to get landlords to comply. And if they do comply by that first court hearing or another court hearing, instead of viewing the fine as a punishment for, you didn't do this in a timely fashion. The tenant had to suffer through longer than they should have under the law. It's considered, well, you finally did what you're responsible for, and so we'll eliminate, you know, the vast majority of the fine. And I will put in a plug for Council Member Mink. I think there's a tomorrow, there's sort of a hearing on a new bill that she introduced that will provide the Office of Consumer Protection and OCA and the Department of Housing and Community Affairs ways to additional ways to get at that issue. And I'm with several of us. I'm a co-sponsor that I've built along with others and I think we're, yeah, that's a good point. Just a little bit on the list, which is great because I see the banners when you pull up the list. It's a PDF. It doesn't have headings of what the columns are. So it's hard to, I think I know what most of them are. Like the first one, I think, is the year the property is built. The headings on the first page. Yeah, the first page. It just doesn't really show you what the numbers mean. We need to move it down on each page. Because it's on the first page. I'm sure it is, but yeah, but when you click it, it's not there. But yeah, thank you for the progress on this and really appreciate your work. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Mink. the aforementioned. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate the shout out. And I'll then actually let that tie us in because one of the pieces that we're looking at with that bill overall, we're hoping to see much less reliance on sending our code inspectors again and again and again and again, so would it be same issues because hopefully there'll be more of those actually being taken care of in a permanent fashion, less than an incentive or a distance incentive for remedies to be made there if we have this in place. And that could potentially free up more inspector time to be able to attend to those properties that are on the travel properties list, which we're hoping have more of an incentive now to get themselves off the list. I'm just gonna ask if, when we get the list of the 11 properties and how those are scheduled out, if we can include like how many units there are each of us, obviously that has a big impact on how long that could take, and as we're kind of trying to get a sense of scale here and capacity in the current student's letters, like that information would be helpful. Sure. Great, thank you. And then, again, just looking at this arena, we have a form of war, which shows how many of these properties are VP properties every year, and we're all very familiar with quite a number of them. But obviously, you know, as these properties have continued to fail, especially since your after year, as a bit for number of them. But obviously, you know, these properties have continued to fail inspections year after year. The issue hasn't been for many of them. Reinspection, the issue has been that they have been choosing not to make the appropriate remedies. So I'm really hoping that with all of these various pieces of legislation that we have moving and that we have passed, we're really going to be able to see some changes in behavior and also some being able to have GHCA able to have more strategic use of their resources. Again, which is not to say that you are being un-street against the way the structure is set up, the courts, etc. We do have a lot of inspectors who are going to deliver excitations that are never going to be paid. In fact, can you give us a percentage again on how many of those the percent of that we pursue and work that we, the DHCA generally recoups? So are you saying the percentage that we get back? I can get that percentage for you. I can get that, yeah. Sure. I was looking at it just recently in regards to the CPC bill. I think it's something like five percent. That's very low. Very, very low which really points to how much time our specters spend out there delivering the union sanctions delivering the citations and then we go to court for over a million dollars per year and then we're coop almost none of it because most of it is being dismissed as directed written noted. So hoping to really see some systemic changes here and obviously we want to see more of these properties coming off the trouble and ask that risk lists and I think having these different incentives is going to help with the motions. So thanks. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I don't think we have any other questions on this. So let's move on to the next part of the conversation related to the changes. So as we were working on the rent stabilization regulation, we recognized after the law was passed that there is going to be this significant new connectivity between it, the law and regulation and the existing trouble property law and regulation. So the folks in code enforcement have been working for several months, well, many, many months, with Office of the County Attorney to try to develop regulations, the amendments to the regulations that fit within the existing law as compared to going through and trying to rewrite the trouble properties law. And so this has resulted in draft regulations that were published on February 1st in the county register. Today, March 2nd was the deadline for written submissions, but since that fell on a Sunday today is the deadline. And so, you know, waiting to see, we haven't received any yet, but we, some people have told us they're going to, so we'll see. So, the proposed regulation 1-25 amends the time frame related to when multifamily properties will be notified of their inspection results and their associated designations. It also outlines the new methodology, DHCA will utilize to evaluate multifamily inspection results results used to determine a property's troubled at-risk or compliance status. So I should go back to the first bullet point about notification. What? The next page is the next one. Yeah, I'll solve. Okay, so third, additionally, the proposed regulation details, the steps that troubled and at-risk properties must undertake to potentially change their troubled and at-risk designations. And lastly, the proposed regulation details the steps that trouble the net risk properties must undertake to potentially change their trouble and at risk designations. And lastly, the proposed regulation sets inspections fees for landlord, owner, requested inspections. Because we're kind of entering a new realm of requested inspections if they want to get out from under the designations early and so that needed to be added in. So more detailed information on the next page or next slide. The current regulations require that DHCA conduct mandated inspections for all multifamily properties for each fiscal year. All inspections are complete at the end of the fiscal year, and at the end of the fiscal year, DHCA must evaluate the inspection results to determine if the inspected properties fall at the troubled at-risk or compliant categories. The properties receive their scores and results through individual notifications at the end of the fiscal year and through a troubled property report that is published on Sep. 15th of each year. So you could be getting your inspection on October 1st and you would not know until the following September 15th what your score was and if your trouble they're at risk. And that is problematic, especially now with the consequences. So under the proposed new regulations, properties will receive their scores and results within 30 days of the scoring analysis that is conducted after the inspection has been completed. So much more quickly. And that's beneficial for landlords. You know, much more quickly. And it's beneficial for tenants because waiting a year to be notified. So landlords know because of the notices of violation of the citations, but the consequences are known much sooner. It's important to know that the reason we have to wait a year is because of how the initial regulations were written. So it required that all of the properties be inspected and had sort of a convoluted process for evaluating a scoring criteria before you could determine what those scores were. So the next slides will talk a little bit about that. So thank you. The current regulations require that DHCA calculate properties total violation and TV and severity violation scores, BES after completing all property inspections. Those scores are plotted on a graph where a trouble property, where a property's troubled at risk or a compliant designation is determined by where the property scores fall on the graph. So it's relative to the other scores. The TV and SV axes are determined by a cumbersome formula involving an analysis of the average scores of all inspected properties. Properties whose scores fall in the upper right quadrant are determined trouble. Properties whose scores fall in the upper left or lower right and lower right quadrants are determined to be at risk. And properties whose scores fall in the lower left quadrant are determined to be compliant. Under the proposed new regulations, property scores will be termed based on a fixed scoring method with specific thresholds for acceptable TV and SV scores, much simpler to calculate. Properties with TV and SV scores above both thresholds will be considered troubled. Properties with a TV or SV score above the threshold with, so both is troubled one or the other is considered at risk and properties with both TV and SV scores below the threshold will be determined to be compliant. Again, simpler system but still complies with the law. Next slide. Under the current regulations, properties are inspected in accordance with schedules set by DHCA. Trouble properties are inspected every year. At-risk properties are inspected. According to law, could be every one, two, or three years, but typically they have been done every two years. Compliant properties are inspected according to law could be every one, two, or three years, but typically they have been done every two years. Compliant properties are inspected every three years. Trouble-to-rat risk property designations do not change until the next scheduled DHCD mandated annual semiannual inspection or until they clear all violations, submit two quarters of maintenance logs, and submit a DHCA- corrective action plan, pass another whole building inspection. That latter part where you go through all those different things, that's what's allowed in the law under an appeal to the director to evaluate them sooner than the annual inspection. So we weren't able to change that because that's what's in the law as compared to the regulation. We'd have to go back and amend the law for that. Under the proposed new regulations, trouble-derat risk properties may request an inspection sooner than their next DHC-8 mandated inspection. To receive a sooner inspection, troubled properties must first correct all violations identified during their initial inspection. Subit an approved corrective action plan approved by DHCA and submit to approved quarters of tenant work requests. To receive a sooner inspection, at risk properties must first correct all violations identified during their initial inspections, so they have a lower threshold of just correcting. And for trouble in at-risk properties to be deemed compliant, their inspection scores for a new inspection must yield results for a compliant property. Because you wouldn't want to inspect, find out they corrected all the violations and they have a whole bunch new violations that would make them trouble their at risk. So it's all about having that consequence lifted is about truly becoming compliant in status. Next slide. Under the proposed regulations, fees for requested inspections will mirror the existing key schedule in which fees are not assessed unless inspections are required after the second re-inspection. The initial and second inspections are free. Any subsequent inspection fees are assessed according to the following schedule and accordance and with the regulation 2920-0303, I won't go ahead and read through all that, but it's there for your reference as to how we do the charges for those. And they're set up in a way that if a landlord complies quickly, then there's no extra charges. But if we have to go back over and over and over again, then that's additional burden on us. And so we are able to get fees for doing that. So we, as I said, published the draft regulations in the February 1st register. We had only a couple of stakeholders have called the request to have a conversation. And we had teams meeting to answer their questions and to hear some of their suggestions for improvement. And for a productive, they generally liked what we had, but suggest that other things could be added. And we asked them because we have to do this, we asked them to submit those in writing. So hopefully those will be coming to us in writing sometime today. As I already mentioned about the deadlines. So after the deadline is closed, starting Starting tomorrow we will work expeditiously to evaluate any received comments and work with the office of the county attorney to determine which to incorporate because they They are the ultimate check on Does this the regulation can't go beyond what the law does and so they're the ones who always kind of check and make sure what we're proposing for the regulation fits. And also anytime we get recommendations, they help us evaluate, does this recommendation fit within the bounds of the law. Once the revisions are complete, we will submit them to the county executive for review and then to the county council council and we hope to do this as quickly as possible And that'll all depend on the how many recommendations we receive how many of them there are and Okay open up to any questions any colleagues have? Good So once this is approved and all done and translated that offer that I made in the previous item to have a Town hall meeting in Spanish. I want to combine the two issues Okay, that's all but thank you so much for all your work I Appreciate it. I think the ideal is to work out any feedback received and to have as much of this buttoned up and shared with us as possible so we can move through the process as quickly as possible. I think it's in everybody's interest to make this more workable. And I appreciate the department's efforts to try to address some of these operational issues or have been some challenges in adapting the dynamics here with the rent stabilization law and the trouble properties law, the regs versus the law. There's some operational dynamics both for the departments and for the property owners to comply and to try to understand how to move forth at in some clarity and understanding among the public, those who are living in these properties who want to see them address. So I would appreciate that. My one question is really about those ongoing properties. And it's one thing how quickly can we get those who are trying to get off the list. To me, that's the most important and that's the lowest hanging fruit because we should be working together to make properties as safe and positive living environments as possible. It's a shared obligation that we have as a government and property owners have as landlords and we need to make sure that we're working together to make that happen. So those who want to comply, we should be bending over backwards to get back to reinspect, to clear up and to clarify. And so I appreciate some of the changes that are being made, particularly with the 30-day change that could have been 11 months or 13 months even before. And some of the other dynamics. But the one question is, what is the approach to those that are chronically on troubled properties who have consistently been on the at risk? Is there an approach that the department is taking with that? We spend most of the time talking about the inspections and getting folks off the list, who want to get off the list, which I do think is the top priority. I want to be very clear about that. I want you to spend, you know, the primary energy on that because, you know, that is the immediately fixable problem to help people right now. But the second piece obviously is, you know, the goal isn't to have people on a list. It's to get people off the list and make sure the properties are safe and dignified and habitable to civilized. So I would say that we have been working for year and a half on what we can do under existing law and regulation or what we could try to propose that would give more teeth. And I will say this provision in the red stabilization law does go a long way to giving more teeth because if you remain troubled or at risk, it used to be as Mr. Bell and Robinson indicated just kind of a cost of doing business if you get these fines and have to go to court, it's something's survivable. And there is a business model that relies on this kind of this pattern of behavior. That said, if you're not allowed to raise your rents, that is a much more severe incentive to change your business model. That said, the bill that will go before the full council tomorrow that council member Mink sponsored and that council vice president Joondo and others co-sponsored is a way to get at. We are not, we have to go to district court. And so district court, you can't go for punitive damages or I feel like kind of stop action orders. This new bill will allow consumer protection because currently in the consumer protection bill, I mean the consumer protection law and regulation, there is an exemption for the land or tenant relationship. And this new bill would take out that exemption. And the Office of Consumer Protection working with the Office of the County Attorney is able to take lawsuits to circuit court where they do have access to getting higher level penalties as well as stop action orders. And that is a much stronger way to take on folks who do not seem to be inclined to comply. Appreciate that. Councilor Vice President, Joanna. I appreciate that. It was going to be a similar line of questions. I think that will help. And given your resources, I agree. You know, you want to focus on doing what you can do, and this will greatly speed things up, but the new proposed regulations. I do think if there can be some level of, again, to the public, what you can't control on the publication of, not just if I pull up both years. Oh, they're there. No, it should be an easy way to say, like these are the folks who haven't been complying. And that should be able to be looked at in a way that can be lifted up pretty easily. So what I'm hearing you say, you'd like for us to sort of identify properties that have been true. Yeah, I mean, multi. I think that should be a, yeah, a sublist or a way to, or a column or something, you know, just some way to draw attention. Again, you know, I don't want you, it doesn't something you spend hours on because there's not a ton of you, more you can do with the current regime, but I do think it should be noticed and it should be lifted up so that there can be pressure and it can be highlighted. So perhaps take a look maybe three or more years on the list in some way of noting that asterisk, some additional supplemental list, something else. I think that's the you know the request at least giving that some thought and coming back to us of what you're thinking I would suggest not just just doing something, but perhaps coming up with your thought of what you might do and then come back to the committee for your feedback. And then we can assess that and decide whether or not that would work. I will say I think in order for this to not feel like a gotcha dynamic where you're going after the bad actors, I do think the speed of the reinspections, helping people get off the list, that is so important because demonstrating that the department's goal is not to shame people who are on the list, the goal is to get people off the list. That really needs to be the primary objective, but to the point where those who are not interested in getting off the list, we should help those who want to get off the list, get off the list, but note the fact that there are those who perhaps don't want to get off the list who are not making reasonable attempts to get off the list. And noting that seems fair to you. I think that's a very important point that you made because the original list was the The motivation was shame and we as the county did not do a good job of making it accessible so people could find it as Mr. Bovel noted earlier about difficult finding it on Estad and now it's there's both shame but it's the financial consequences. Oh, I care it in a stick and we weren't doing, we weren't doing that great on either one. And I will say that once the, when stabilization law was passed, telling her team got inundated with calls from landlord saying, what do I need to do to get off this list? How can I get off this list? Why am I trouble? I never, because you went to the pocketbook. So, I think the awareness is there. And the other issue that we've referenced in here, and it was just a tangential reference, but the fines. There's escalated inspection fees. So we wanted to make sure that we don't have landlords coming to us saying, hey, come back and take a look at my stuff. We fixed everything. Sometimes they haven't. And Tamela's folks will go back. They'll say the stuff was fixed. It wasn't. So these escalated inspection fees will be sort of an incentive to make sure that landlords actually do the work that they're supposed to do, taking care of the tenants that live there. Appreciate it. All right, well, we have a number of follow-up items. you're going to come back to the committee with, appreciate the work, we have the outstanding regs that are going to come back to us after the input comes in, which... All right, well we have a number of follow-up items. You're going to come back to the committee with, appreciate the work. We have the outstanding regs that are going to come back to us after the input comes in, which is imminent. At this point, truly imminent at this point and appreciate the time today and the comprehensive nature of the discussion on these items. And with that, colleagues, we are adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.