rental property fees

[jackie taylor]

I am furious with Lakewood City Hall for raising my Housing lincense fee from $45.00 per year to a whopping $150.00 per year. Lakewood residents lets unite and fight this increase.

[dl meckes]

From the

MINUTES
OF THE
REGULAR MEETING OF
LAKEWOOD CITY COUNCIL
HELD IN COUNCIL CHAMBERS
12650 DETROIT AVENUE
APRIL 19, 2004
7:30 P.M.

http://www.lkwdpl.org/city/cc/mt040419.htm

Mr. FitzGerald submitted the following report:

Your Finance Committee met last Tuesday and also before today’s Council Meeting and we covered a lot of ground. One of the items on our agenda at the last Finance Committee was the sewer rates and we chose to take that off tonight’s docket because we wanted to have Council to have the opportunity to begin to meditate and reflect on the information from Metcalf and Eddy’s presentation and we felt that that was premature at this time. We didn’t bring that forward for the docket tonight until people can take that information and study it. ON the other issues, there were a number of requests from the Administration for increases in various fees that had to do with housing license fees, permit fees, various fees and charges that are charged by the Building Department.

These are being brought forward for two reasons. One was because the City is in financial need and we’re looking at every possible revenue stream to assist the City in tough times financially. Second, is that these particular fees had not been adjusted up since 1991, so you’ve got more than a doze years of fees which have never been increased. One of the pieces of information that the Committee asked for and a lot of it was already provided by the Finance Department, but there’s more coming, was; how are we in relation to other communities as far as the fees and charges that their building departments charge. And the short answer to that is that our fees are significantly less than most of our similarly situated communities. It is logical that there’d probably be some adjustment. The other part of the analysis is that we looked at the relationship between the cost of the building Department and the revenue of the building Department and if you go back to 1991 which is the last time that the fees were changed you’d have a rough correlation between the amount of funds that the Building Department is bringing in through various fees and permits and so forth and what their personnel costs are to run the department. You’re within $100,000 or so, if you go back ten or twelve years. What you have now, is you have a pretty wide gap. You have a little bit over a million dollars in personnel costs with the City building department and you still have our income with from the Building Department as pretty much flat. There’s a deficit now of three or four hundred thousand dollars. It’s not supporting itself the way that it was twelve years ago because the personnel costs have increased but our revenue and our charges that we’re charging aren’t increasing.

The general sense of the Committee was that these things should be increased however, we also heard testimony from various members of the business community in particular folks who are investing and have made investments in multi-family apartment buildings and condominiums and so forth. First of all they conceded that the rates were low in many cases and could justify an increase in those rates and were willing to go along with that. They didn’t want twelve years of not raising the rates to be dropped on them all at one time so that they did not have an opportunity to adjust to that economically. The Committee felt that that was a reasonable position. Also, I have to not, that the Administration had already scaled back somewhat their original permit fee increase request for those owners. But the owners wanted some additional consideration and they also wanted an opportunity to provide us additional information about the way other suburbs are handling this particular problem, we felt that that was reasonable. We suspended any further consideration from Council or actually adopting permit fees until we could have more in-depth conversations with them. I’d also that we tired to do something a little bit different with the Finance Committee which was when we were going to look at raising a fee that we wouldn’t look at it in a vacuum and just at the fee but we’d also look at the performance of the Department and see if there’s any area where we could be able to tell the public well not only is the fee going to go up in this area but there’s also going to be an increased level of service from that Department. We thought that that made sense from a management point of view.

The Chamber of Commerce and again, some of the apartment owners made some suggestions of improvements in the way that the Building Department could treat apartment owners and property owners who are doing an outstanding job and going above and beyond the minimum of Code compliance. In Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights where they have special programs where those owners who are doing an exemplary job get recognized by the City and get some marketing assistance through the City’s website. It could be done for relatively low cost and that’s important to some of them. I think that we’re going to be able to bring in front of Council hopefully, before we ask for an increase in permit a corresponding increase in service that we’re providing both the folks that are investing in the rental community and also tenants who want to be able to identify quality rental opportunities in the City of Lakewood. I think it’s going to be something pretty creative that’s been very successful particularly in the City of Shaker Heights.