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Mayor: Abolish rental commission
(Published March 24, 2003)
By KATHRYN SINZINGER
Staff Writer
Mayor Anthony A. Williams wants to abolish the city’s Rental Housing Commission, a budget-cutting proposal that tenant advocates say will leave many low-to-moderate-income residents with little recourse against unscrupulous landlords.
The quasi-judicial commission, created about 20 years ago by the city’s rent control laws, has resolved thousands of landlord-tenant disputes short of expensive, lengthy court litigation.
"They’re not even considering the spillover effect" of abolishing the commission, said attorney David Conn, who often represents D.C. tenants in disputes. "They could flood the D.C. Court of Appeals with a lot of unmeritorious cases."
Few of the Rental Housing Commission’s decisions are appealed, according to a spokeswoman for the D.C. Court of Appeals, which she described as the nation’s second-busiest state-level appellate court. If the commission were abolished, all appeals of tenant petition decisions would go directly to the court.
Abolishing the commission is among cost-saving measures the mayor presented to D.C. City Council with his fiscal 2004 budget proposal on March 19. Theresa Lewis, deputy director of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), said eliminating the commission would save taxpayers $227,000 a year. The commission is part of DCRA.
No estimates were available about how taxpayers’ costs at the Court of Appeals would be affected by abolishing the commission. Funding of D.C. courts was taken over by the federal government during the control board era.
The three-member Rental Housing Commission, appointed by the mayor, acts as the appellate body for decisions on tenant petitions made by hearing examiners working for the city’s Office of the Rent Administrator. The three-year terms of the current commissioners – Chairman Ruth Banks, Ronald Young and Jennifer Long – expire in July. All three are lawyers who serve as full-time, paid commissioners.
Banks, when contacted for comment, said she could not comment on the mayor’s proposal and referred the call to DCRA officials.
The number of cases considered by the commission has increased dramatically in recent years, according to figures presented to the city council during an oversight hearing in February. Last year, the commission reviewed 390 decisions, conducted 45 hearings and issued 56 general orders. Eighty-nine new appeals were filed during fiscal 2002, which ended Sept. 30. The commission closed 52 cases during the year and left 42 pending. Pending appeals had grown to 59 by the end of January.
Tenant advocates attribute the increase in appeals to a number of factors, including economic development pressures that many allege have sent some landlords looking for loopholes in the law to evict low-paying tenants in gentrifying neighborhoods.
Betty Sellers of the Tenant Action Network, which in recent months has been lobbying the city council to strengthen tenant-protection laws, said she believes Mayor Williams has made a "political decision under the guise of a budget crunch" to abolish the commission.
"I think they’re going to continue their ‘affordable housing’ advocacy and then let the rent control law expire," Sellers charged. "We’re gonna have a big battle on our hands."
Conn said most cases that tenants take to the Court of Appeals without the help of an attorney are dismissed on technical grounds, rather than on the merits, because the tenants fail to properly follow court procedures. Most tenants who appeal to the Rental Housing Commission do so without a lawyer, he said.
He said he believes abolishing the commission would have the heaviest impact on tenants with moderate incomes who "don’t quite qualify" for free legal help and might find it "too expensive or too intimidating to appeal" adverse decisions directly to court.
"The Court of Appeals is much more technically difficult to deal with without a lawyer," Conn said.
In his testimony March 21 during the city council’s hearing on DCRA’s fiscal 2004 budget, Conn charged that part of the agency’s budget shortfall is a result of city officials’ failure to ensure that owners of the city’s 100,000-plus apartments pay an annual $15 per unit registration fee.
DCRA Director David A. Clark told the council his agency has collected $2.2 million from those fees during the past two years, a figure Conn contends is at least $800,000 short of full compliance. Clark testified that the fiscal 2004 budget request for his agency is $887,708 less in local funds than its approved fiscal 2003 budget.
"If they were more zealous at collecting the money, they should be able to find $227,000 to continue the commission," Conn told The Common Denominator.
Copyright 2003, The Common Denominator