Barstow Rentals Property Management
Barstow Rentals Property Management – Every home or apartment owner and renter in Barstow will soon be subject to a mandatory “inspection program” that gives local departments and county “enforcement agencies” legally questionable power to enter residences without a search warrant or suspicion of a crime.
The Barstow City Council voted unanimously a few months ago to mandate annual inspections for all properties containing at least one “rental dwelling unit,” though it gave immunity to hotels, motels, health facilities and student dormitories from the mandate.
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The program is set to go into effect on January 1, 2022. However, most tenants are likely still in the dark. Some local homeowners, whose properties are owned by a management company or agency, also said they had no idea the ordinance existed when they asked recently.
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Word has spread over the past month, however, and some locals have begun to oppose the program at City Hall and during public forums.
“Like my mother used to say, I’m so angry I could chew some notches off,” said Ira Gwin, a longtime Barstow resident and property owner who has led public opposition.
His argument is one of several that lawyers, academics and civil liberties groups have made in the United States for decades: Mandatory inspection programs violate the Constitution’s protection “against unreasonable searches and seizures” guaranteed to all – including renters.
“What you’re seeing here in San Bernardino County is emblematic of increasingly invasive inspection programs that provide little or no recourse to tenants,” said Rob Peccola, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which is litigating and lobbies against policies it sees as government overreach. .
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Barstow’s official reason for a mandate on rent inspections is to raise property values, public health and “environmental justice,” and to “create an aesthetically pleasing community by cleaning up neighborhoods and enforcing codes municipal,” according to city documents.
Other municipalities in the United States, including Victorville and Palmdale, have implemented their own rental inspection programs in previous years. Each differs in various ways.
Barstow’s iteration was led by Chris Heldreth, who is both the director of the city’s Department of Building and Safety and its fire marshal. The program is something Heldreth has “actually been working on for four years, if not longer,” he said at a June 21 City Council meeting.
“My goal is not to finish. My goal is not to chase after you and make you comply. I would like everyone to comply,” he said at the June 21 meeting. “Sometimes you have to do these things, but the goal behind everything is to make a better and livable situation for everyone.”
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Peccola, who has won court challenges against similar programs in other U.S. cities and counties, said the most important aspect of Barstow’s ordinance is something he doesn’t recognize.
“What stood out to me because of its absence was some sort of mandate provision, about what to do when someone doesn’t give entry,” he said.
In other words, Barstow’s new guidelines for rental inspections are not search warrants referencing or the Fourth Amendment in general.
“At the very least,” Peccola continued, “there should be a requirement that when a tenant doesn’t voluntarily consent to a search of the inside of their home, you have to go get a search warrant based on probable cause.”
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Barstow’s ordinance instead states that if an owner or tenant “refuses to allow access to conduct an exterior or interior inspection, city staff and the city attorney may use all legal remedies to ensure that an inspection is done.”
Most rental inspection warrants in the United States require an “administrative warrant” to be granted by a judge if a tenant refuses the intrusion.
The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that conducting health and safety inspections without such a warrant and without the consent of the owner or occupant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Administrative warrants are easier for municipal agents to obtain than general warrants because, apparently, the inspections have nothing to do with a suspected crime.
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Peccola noted another line in Barstow’s ordinance, which says: “The Building Official,” currently Heldreth, “at his discretion may request inspections from other city departments and/or agencies of enforcement of San Bernardino County, including but not limited to the County Health Department. and the Barstow Fire Department.”
That means both city and county police officers are “absolutely” included among Barstow’s potential inspection officers, according to Peccola.
“Even if they don’t show up with law enforcement, if they see something that they subjectively think could be indicative of criminal activity, or drug trafficking or whatever, that prevents them from picking up their phone and calling them immediately the police?” he said, adding that a chief inspector in a city he had previously argued with did exactly that.
Peccola argues that these programs are still “very invasive” without police involvement, allowing government officials to see what medications people are taking, enter children’s bedrooms, and learn about religion, political beliefs and someone’s economic status.
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“It’s an end run around the Fourth Amendment when you can just go straight for the financial jugular with the landlord,” he said, “and it creates this very coercive social pressure with landlords who want to respect their tenants’ privacy.”
Barstow’s program is aimed at apartments and houses in which people pay rent to live. It’s also among the tracks of a new “environmental justice element” in the Barstow General Plan, approved by the City Council at an Aug. 2 meeting.
Anyone who owns at least one rental property in Barstow must provide the city with either their own home address and contact information, or that of an “authorized local contact representative” within 15 miles of the property.
Whoever is chosen, that person must “be accessible to the City” at all times: “24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” the ordinance says.
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City officials plan to fund the program by charging rental owners annual fees along with new inspections at least once a year.
The payment of the fees is necessary for the owners to maintain a permit, or “certificate of compliance”. These owners must apply to the city every year to obtain and renew the permit.
An inspection must be conducted within 30 calendar days of the property owner filing a request, the ordinance says. If any violations are identified by a city agent, a second inspection must be conducted within 14 days.
If a property consistently registers perfect scores, terms can be eased to new inspections every two years and the annual fee drops by 50%, the ordinance says.
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For owners who are subject to new inspections once each year, city agents in an initial inspection will personally enter “50-60% of all units on the property”, which means individual houses or apartments. “Any major violation found will result in a 100% inspection of all units” in a follow-up visit.
The ordinance does not specify restrictions on what the city can do in response to repeated violations of its rental inspection program. It implies that extraordinary fines will be imposed first, and says that any person and property in continued violation will eventually be “considered a public nuisance and subject to abatement procedures.”
The City Council approved fees that require property owners to pay $100 a year for each parcel of land on which they own at least one rental unit. Then, they must pay $10 for each additional unit.
This means that the annual fee for a plot would be $110 for a duplex, $190 for a complex with 10 apartments, and $1,090 for a complex with 100 apartments.
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The cost to compensate those three individuals will start at about $227,000 and rise to about $278,000 with annual raises, city documents show.
Most of these new costs, some local landlords say, will likely be passed on to Barstow renters.
The city will notify the owners of the need to renew their permit. Heldreth said at the June 21 meeting that he and staff employed under him are willing to work with property owners who may not be able to meet the 30-day window or a certain notification deadline.
“If they can’t be here in 30 days, well, maybe we’ll be here on the 40th day. And I’m fine with that,” he said.
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All major and minor violations recorded by inspectors, and all non-violation inspections, will be accounted for in a city database. An inspection report will also be written for each property. Both the database and the reports will be available to the public upon request.
Many residents in Barstow want the city to take more action to address issues like homelessness and vacant buildings that have become increasingly present on their streets.
A local landlord, who runs an apartment complex with hundreds of tenants, said they had no idea about the inspection ordinance until the Daily Press asked them, but that they run a fair operation.
The landlord declined a request to be named in this article, citing concerns that a public criticism of the policy may lead to them and their tenants facing punitive inspections as retribution. They were specifically upset to learn that hotels were exempt from the policy.
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Gwin, the landlord who initiated public opposition to the program in Barstow, first expressed his outrage at the Aug. 30 City Council meeting.
“I’ve invested my life in this city,” Gwin told the Daily Press. He runs Hillside Apartments
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