Dan Carpenter leads push to repeal SLO rental inspection program

A city councilman who calls San Luis Obispo’s rental inspection program an unconstitutional invasion of privacy wants to give voters the chance to repeal the ordinance through a special election.

Councilman Dan Carpenter and local attorneys Stew Jenkins and Dan Knight filed an intent to repeal the law with the city, in a declaration that states the city ordinance “requires mandatory intrusive inspections inside homes in San Luis Obispo violating the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.”

Under the program, which was adopted by a majority of the City Council in May 2015, rental homes in San Luis Obispo are subject to routine inspections on a three-year cycle to determine if they conform to health and safety standards.

The program is designed to protect renters from unsafe conditions such as faulty wiring, blocked entry doors, leaky roofs and malfunctioning smoke detectors, among other health, safety and municipal code violations. The city ratcheted up inspections this summer.

But Carpenter said the program discriminates against renters because it doesn’t apply to people who live in owner-occupied homes.

“What bothers me is that this affects a group of people based on their housing status,” Carpenter said. “Renters face a government intrusion of their homes. That’s discriminating, just as it would be to discriminate against people by their gender and color of their skin.”

The initiative will need to be reviewed by City Attorney Christine Dietrick, who will give it an official title and summary, which likely will take a couple of weeks. Then Carpenter and the attorneys will need to collect signatures from at least 15 percent of the city’s registered voters for the initiative to qualify for a public vote.

At that point, the City Council could either adopt the repeal outright or set a special election.

The initiative has missed the deadline to qualify for the Nov. 8 ballot, so a special election would be needed.

Advocates of the inspection program, including Mayor Jan Marx, and council members Carlyn Christianson and John Ashbaugh, say the ordinance offers a mechanism to protect renters from slumlords and substandard living conditions.

They say renters won’t report code violations out of fear of eviction or their rents being raised.

But Carpenter says the city’s anonymous reporting program provides sufficient protection against landlords who violate housing codes and that rent hikes will be passed on to tenants because of inspection fees.

This story was originally published August 30, 2016 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Dan Carpenter leads push to repeal SLO rental inspection program."