College Station City Council reviewing rental registration ordinances

Source: The Eagle, Bryan, TexasNov.存倉 01--College Station's rental registration has come under close review by the City Council as staffers work to keep pace with an ordinance that doesn't allow more than four unrelated people to live in a house.The program primarily is used to keep track of contact information for both the owners and local points of contact for a rented home in the event of code enforcement issues for the city. Rental homes continue to be a hot-button issue in College Station, as many single-family residential neighborhoods around the Texas A&M campus are transforming into rental property clusters.The city council asked to discuss the rental registration program in a special workshop meeting Wednesday, hoping eventually to give staffers direction for potential changes.Bob Cowell, planning director for College Station, said the registration system is helpful for code enforcement and neighborhood plans. Meanwhile, several members of the council questioned why and how the information is being used.Homeowners in the South Knoll neighborhood recently led an effort to try and better control situations involving students increasingly renting homes in the area, but the council opted to stay out of it, pointing to the homeowner's association as a potential means of enforcement.Based on feedback from the well-publicized dilemma, Cowell said the city decided to use the rental registration to more proactively police the issue of unrelated people living in a house, starting with 80 newly constructed five-bedroom homes in College Station. All but 20 of them are registered as rental homes, but the city allows only for up to four unrelated people to live in one house."What we did was take the low-hanging fruit," Cowell said, referring to those new houses with five bedrooms. "We're going to see if those are being lived in by more than four."Cowell said city staff worked with the legal department to record activity outside about 50 of the city's new five-bedroom rental homes, recording how many vehicles are being parked outside the homes and its license plates. Cowell said the city has so far initia儲存ed a case on three of those homes based on the information they gathered.Cowell explained how state rules require certain code enforcement issues, such as overgrown grass, to be noted by the city and reported to the homeowners, rather than the local points of contact. Councilman John Nichols asked why the city couldn't additionally notify any local points of contact, and Cowell said the rental registration program did not exist when the ordinance was written.The council could decide to require local points of contact be notified in more code enforcement issues. Though the city often notifies the local points of contact when the code doesn't require them to, Councilman James Benham and Nichols agreed that it should be required. Cowell said it may become more difficult to prosecute code violations."I don't think there's a need to have it in the ordinance as much as it needs to be part of the practice, and, in general, it is, but it is not always done," Cowell said. "And the reason I say [it should] not [be] in the ordinance is because if you don't do that and you're trying to prosecute a case, it won't happen, you'll get it thrown out because you didn't follow process."Cowell said usually judges look for compliance, so if a fifth unrelated resident has moved out by the time the household is taken to court, a judge is not going to take action by assessing a fine. Cowell said neighborhoods often complain that even though the issue is resolved, they didn't learn their lesson."This process is set up to resolve the issue, not take punitive action," Cowell said.The program brings in about $80,000 a year from rolling $15 renewals, and the council discussed moving the charges to every other year or scrapping costs to be in the program in favor of strictly enforcing an administrative fee for property owners who are renting without notifying the city.The council likely will meet sometime this month to continue discussing and reviewing the rental registration program.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Eagle (Bryan, Texas) Visit The Eagle (Bryan, Texas) at .theeagle.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉