Lineberry Alliance Blogs

Yesterday, the Budget and Economic Development (BED) Committee unanimously voted to include criminal activity convictions as strikes towards PROP. They made special note to include all rental units, where previously this was limited to only 20 unit complexes and below, in the revised program. This is important as it was one of the items that came up during last week’s public hearing.

Other changes including changing the Nuisance Party Ordinance (NPO) to a civil violation. Previously, this required a conviction for a strike against a landlord.

The third change includes creating a mandatory rental property registry component. The registry would be $30 for the first unit and $10 / unit for each unit after that. This topic also came up during last week’s public hearing. An argument was made that if a landlord supplies the correct information on the first unit, that the information would be persistent across all units. However, it appears to me that since Raleigh is at about 52% rental property throughout the city, that BED is looking at the registry component to fund the PROP team, as well as providing renters, citizens, and other parties the ability to contact landlords via a public database.

These changes are slotted to go into effect on January 5, 2009, allowing a 60-day grace period, which will fund a PROP Team made up of two administrative staff, an inspector, and a police officer.

Next, these proposed changes will now need to pass the Council by 6 votes on Tuesday July 17, 2008 or 5 votes in two readings (next week and the first meeting in July). This is a win-win-win for many parties involved: for neighborhoods, for renters and for responsible landlords conducting business in the City of Raleigh.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under DDNA, Raleigh City Council. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.