November 27, 2023 — Meeting Transcript

Here she comes. Okay. Well, once again, welcome everybody to our Friday strategy session where we talk about things and usually we don't take any action, but today we might. So I'd let you take it away, Mr. City Manager.

Since we do have one business item on here, we will need the city clerk to call the roll.

Oh, okay. Very good. Alderman Berkowitz, Alderman McAndrew here. Alderman Gary Feder.

Oh, okay. Very good. Alderman Berkowitz, Alderman McAndrew here. Alderman Fader.

Alderman Rick Hummell.

Alderman Hummel.

City Manager David Gipson.

City Manager Gibson.

Mayor Harris. Here. Thank you.

Okay, so the... Action item we have on the agenda this afternoon is a liquor license for Barcelona. Barcelona LLC is requesting a liquor license to sell all kinds of intoxicating liquor at retail by the drink, including Sundays at 7810 Unit 1W on Forsyth Boulevard. The police department has completed its review of the application and supports issuance of the requested license. The planning and development department has approved the application with no objections. The applicant has chosen not to submit a petition from surrounding property owners and first floor tenants. As a result, he is aware that this application must have a super majority vote of five board members in order to be approved. Staff has requested the representative attend the meeting. Mr. Schmitz is here this afternoon. Staff does recommend that the Board of Alderman pass a motion to approve the liquor license to sell all kinds of intoxicating liquor at retail by the drink, including Sundays and weekends. We apologize for the late addition this afternoon, but Mr. Schmitz has opened his doors to Barcelona on Forsyth. Our next meeting isn't until the 28th, and I know that liquor sales are an important part of his business model. So I'm sure if he comes up, he'll be happy to explain that to the board. So that's all I have, unless you have any questions.

Yeah. Any discussion, questions you'd like to address to Mr. SchmitZ? Not so much. Okay. Hey, I have a question though, because I have not been there yet. I'm so sorry. But what, want to come up to the podium and just say your name and your address and all that good stuff and make sure your green light is on there.

Good afternoon, Frank Schmitz, owner of Barcelona Tapas. Thank you very much for squeezing me into this meeting. Yes, you are right. Liquor sales are totally important. And with the holiday coming up, that's actually the biggest weekend that we have. As you all know, I've been in Clayton with Barcelona for 22 years. The last two years, we were closed because of the big development. I sort of retired until I decided it was too boring and found the location on Forsyth. over there. And there was a little Mexican takeout restaurant in there didn't have to do much work in it. So it's a perfect thing for me, it's a little smaller. Considering that lately, it's hard to get enough staff in. I'm fully staffed now, I will be able to operate seven days a week right from the beginning. And I look forward to any other questions you have.

Is it still the tapas style, the same sort of menu that you had before?

Right. It is exactly the same menu, very similar decorations in there. Same menu, same sangria and a couple of draft beers and the same thing I did before, just on a smaller scale.

Okay,

good.

Any other questions? Frank, I have a question. So actually after we're done, we're talking about, I don't know if you know about the smart training, basically fake ideas are becoming better and better. Right,

yes.

So I guess first off, do you feel pretty confident that the people you've hired can recognize real IDs versus fake IDs or-

Absolutely. I've rehired the same manager I had before who went through that smart training.

And there's

an app on the phone where you can just scan it and it will be pointed out if it's

fake.

And we've never really had that much problem with it. I know it was across the street from us at the time, and then sometimes the overflow would come in. And so it was a little bit difficult at that time. But for the most part, we have very mature clients. But we are definitely trained on it as well.

Oh, good. So the manager has, but then do you require the training for new employees or do you just feel like your manager trains them?

He works five nights a week. I work the other two nights a week that he's not there. So one of us will always be there. But yes, we will train other staff members too. Just haven't had a chance for it yet because we've not been open.

Do you feel like just because we're, I think, going to be discussing it, like as a restaurant owner in Clayton, if we were potentially going to require new restaurants or new liquor licenses to mandate training for all servers, do you think that that would be especially burdensome for you as an owner?

If I take that, for all servers would be difficult because they are so transient. I would say that management should have it, bartenders and management. All services are going to be difficult because some of them only last two or three days, and the next one is like two months, three months, and it's just too transient on that.

Yeah, I appreciate it. I was just kind of curious what your thoughts were because we're about to talk about it.

Yeah, sure. That's good.

Okay, very good. Any other comments or questions? Okay, I can take a motion to approve.

I will make a motion to approve the liquor license for Barcelona LLC at 7810 Unit 1W Forsyth Boulevard. Second.

All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, off you go.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

You're

welcome. See you all soon.

Yeah, you will. Okay. Then moving on to our discussion agenda, we're, I guess, going to just perfect segue go right into the training for serving liquor. Yeah. Thank you, Bridget for I think you brought this to our attention. Yeah.

Yes, I brought I mean i'm and I think everybody knows i'm the liaison to the all in coalition so we're lucky enough lily is with us today lily schluss schluss or slicer yes. Who she is head of the all in coalition coalition so it's just something we talked about at the meetings and something she and I have discussed so.

All right, excellent. We'll jump into a brief presentation here and then we'll have a discussion. So we have been running compliance checks recently through the police department. And over the last 12 months, we've actually performed 53 compliance checks. We had 15 instances where alcohol was sold to a minor during those checks. So the total failure rate was 28%. And I don't know how that is relative to other areas, but it seems high on its face. A mixture of retail stores and restaurants were found to be noncompliant. So we can't say it was all restaurants or we just have a problem with, you know, wine stores or whatever it is or convenience stores in town. It's a mixture of everything. Servers found in violation do receive municipal ordinance citations, so they go to municipal court. There's a fine levy. There could be additional training required through the court, but they do end up making an appearance there. And then sale to a minor is grounds for suspension or revocation of an established liquor license. We've not at this point in time taken any action whatsoever. uh in that regard if we had someone that was a perhaps a repeat offender and we've not had anyone uh fall into that category then i think that's a discussion uh that we would initiate with the board of alderman to see where that might might fall uh so that's that's just a brief history of compliance checks any questions about that

this clarification i'm pretty sure i know when it says servers you're talking about the establishment right

no it's the individual the

individual server that makes the sale violation

So whether it's the person that checks you out, whether it's the bartender, whoever that may be. Any other questions? Yes.

I have a question about the nature of the compliance check. Is it observation? Is it undercover? Is it

like what- Actually send a minor in that. attempts to purchase alcohol and if that purchase is that transaction is made okay so it's like undercover

it is but it's interesting like lily and i've talked they don't send in somebody with like a beard like they send in somebody that purposely looks like 15 years old i mean it could be so i i don't want you to think i'm just undercover person looks like they're 22 because they don't so because we've kind of talked about that because it's not somebody that's supposed to look 25. It is somebody that looks young, purposefully.

Okay. I mean, that strikes me as high. Yeah.

And do they have fake IDs or not? No. Oh, so they're just not even being carded. The

IDs are not being checked.

This is actually Lieutenant Jeff DeVores. He can answer all his questions. He runs this operation. In fact, he can also clarify about the summons being issued to the server or the establishment too.

Yeah, so your question was, do they have an ID? So what we do is the miner goes in and they just grab some alcohol and they go up and they attempt to sell. If the server or the retail cashier asks them for ID, then they just simply say either I forgot it or I've lost it. And if the sale continues, then we close. issue a summons that they're in violation we issue a summons to the server or the retail cashier just recently per our prosecuting attorney municipal prosecutor he wants us to start citing the business as well so what we're doing is in addition to the server we're also issuing summons to the on-duty manager and or the owner if they're present

yeah and so uh We just heard from the gentleman before that there's something that you can scan the ID and know if it's real or not.

Correct. Yeah, it's just an app on your phone. I have it on my phone. It's MissouriID.com. Yeah, it's just you can take the ID and you can scan the back of it and it'll actually pop up and it'll give you like a green bar that says, yeah, they're under the age of 21 or over. There's also a feature that if they just give you a birth date, you can type in that birth date and it'll let you know whether it's calculating properly or not.

So these IDs that so many kids get through the mail or whatever it

will be able to say that it's not a true id right because a real id has the features scanned into that barcode that's on the back of your id and that's what the app scans and so if it's a fake id they're not going to have that necessarily in that barcode

and do most establishments have that technology

That I'm not aware of. But what we have done is anytime that there's an establishment that does have a violation, we give them a flyer for that smart training, which is actually a free online training. And we also provide that pamphlet to show them how they can download that app and how to use it.

And the app's not prohibitively expensive or anything? It's free. It's free.

But to clarify, the folks who like quote unquote failed the compliance checks didn't even require ID. Like even if they asked for it, then they, yeah. So how do you recruit the minors who do these checks for

you? Lily has provided some individuals for me. And then we've also had some of our employees have teenagers that are willing to come and help us out.

Okay. Like my daughter has gone to some of the all in coalition meetings and stuff. So Pia Patel. And so that was just, so then I was like, is she going to potentially be asked to do this? I'm going to ask her about it.

If she's willing and interested, I'll definitely take her. Thank you. Any other

So what I try to do is about four to five a year. I try to do it around homecoming, around Christmas break, winter break, the prom time, graduation, then one over the summer break.

We only have about, I think it's six or seven retail locations in town. So I always hit all of those each time. And then depending on our time, um i'll try and hit as many restaurants as we can typically the ones that like napoli uh ones down in the central business district some of the wine places wine and cheese place over on forsyth are the ones that we typically hit thanks

Can you generalize to the extent you find violations, whether the person who has screwed up, whether their response is, oh, I forgot. Boss wants me to get as many sales as I want. I assume nobody would say that. But I mean, is there any sense of what motivates the mistake?

So, I mean, I can't speak for every single one, but we have been told before that, you know, I just wasn't paying attention. Or they feel like they did look older than 21, although, I mean, in those instances, they were actually 16 years old. So it's kind of hard. I mean, they didn't look 21 years old at all.

You're looking for the real ones. Exactly. Thank you.

All right. Thanks. You're welcome.

All right, so that brings us to the SMART training, which has already been mentioned here. The state of Missouri does offer free alcohol responsibility training that is known as SMART. The training sessions only take around one hour to complete. So even if you had a lot of turnover, I can't imagine that one hour during their onboarding process would be a lot of time, but it is an easy program to access. I know it's down for the month of December for some sort of maintenance, but typically it's up and running 12 months of the year. You can log on anytime and complete the training. It's not required by the state, but it is strongly encouraged. If you have 100% employee certification, there are insurance credits that are available through the state for the establishment's liquor liability insurance that's required. An example of a municipality and they're just a handful of them out there would be Columbia, Missouri, that requires the smart training for anyone that serves alcohol within their city limits. So it wouldn't be unusual to pass some sort of regulation requiring that as a part of a liquor license. And then you can see here the benefits of this and what the training actually encompasses. So for bars and restaurants and retail outlets, both recognition of fake IDs, acceptable forms of identification, training on the prevention of service to minors, signs of intoxication in bars and restaurants, advice on how to handle disorderly and intoxicated customers, and laws and liability concerns related to serving underage or intoxicated customers. And then on the retail side, A little bit different than bars and restaurants and that we have signs of third party transactions there so you know they're buying beer and going out to a car and giving it to somebody advice on how to prevent alcohol theft, and then finally again the laws and liability concerns with underage sales. So that's what the training incorporates within that one hour. And then, so just the discussion item here is whether or not the city should at least consider smart training or similar programs requirement for either all that manage establishments to serve or sell alcohol to patrons. And that's what we had just heard from an establishment here a few minutes ago, or we could be a little more stringent and require not just the managers at that facility or managers and bartenders, but anybody that may serve or sell alcohol the patrons you know, we require that of all of them. So I should have broken that down a little bit further because I also put out of compliance. you know, we could either make this where it's required at the outset for one of those groups, or we could make this where if you fail a compliance check, then you have to go and get everybody smart trained. There's some different routes we could go, but just want to gauge the interest in perhaps pursuing that and working on some draft regulations. So I'll open it up to them.

Could it be all like, could it be both in the sense that we have so many? Yeah, I should, I should have had it listed like that. We have so many I mean, yes, I feel like we're always improving liquor licenses, but there's so many already.

Yeah, so we could do all that. I said all that manage establishments. It could be all that manage establish, and yeah, we could do it however. I didn't read it clearly while I was going through it.

can you i think so you said the training is an online training and it's one hour right and is there a cost associated with it

no it's completely free

Okay, so I would agree that's a pretty low bar like if we think it's the right thing to do. I don't feel like I mean, I did more training than that when I started working at Blockbuster as a 16 year old you know so that's not a big deal. From my perspective, I've been even given a transient nature of a lot of turnover. Okay. Okay.

What's the consequence? If we pass this and somebody doesn't comply, what's our enforcement?

Something I think we'd need to build into the violations section of the liquor license regulations that we

have. I'm taken back by 28%, not even ID. So it's a real problem. Having taken five kids through high school here, alcohol was not hard to get.

I

got it here or somewhere else. I

think our checkpoint would be the annual renewal. So when they come in to get an annual renewal, they would have to at that time certify that all of their employees have the training.

Yes. The Board of Aldermen can suspend or revoke a liquor license. You could do it theoretically for one occurrence. We've not done that historically. But if we had again a repeat offender even someone that failed the second time we would bring that to the board's attention let you know we may have an issue

is there a fine if you know like let's say you have a first-time offense is there a fine

there is it goes along with that that summons in that court appearance i'm not sure what the typical fine we've been handing out is for that but that would be up to the municipal

judge i was wondering if if this would also apply to our the marijuana selling as

well good question

Can we tie this together? Because it seems to me that has the same restrictions in regards to selling to minors.

Right. A dispensary through state law has a whole other set of requirements where they have to have ID scans at the door. That's why they had that vestibule set up. that's required. So if you remember when we were talking to Sunrise, you actually have to go into a primary entrance where they have a security person there that's in a lot of cases, they have somebody that's post-certified, but they actually check your identification there and you can't even go into the next door unless you've proven that you have a valid ID. So I'm not sure that we would have... I've not... personally heard of any concerns, we could put something like that in place. But I think there are already really stringent laws as it relates to marijuana.

Have we done the same thing for those? Yeah, so

I think what you're getting at is I wonder what would happen. No, I don't think we have any places operating yet, but when they are, if we would try compliance checks similarly and validate that that's being checked. Yeah, we absolutely could. Right, that's why you're... I

know the state does as well, and I know the state penalties for violating that are extremely heavy.

I wouldn't have known all that because I've never been to one of those places.

And just while we're on that, what about cigarettes? I don't think it's that big a problem anymore, but just saying, isn't there some kind of an age requirement for selling someone cigarettes?

18 is the requirement to purchase cigarettes or vapes or anything like that. I don't know that we've run compliance checks for tobacco or

vapes in quite some time. I think we only have tobacco in Clayton. We don't have vapes. Just Walgreens and grocery store.

Walgreens and a couple cigar stores, right?

Yeah. So I don't know if we – do we have some kind of setup for that

or – You've never done a compliance check for cigarettes?

I don't think it's a big, big issue. So unless we really want to, we could fold it into this, but we wouldn't have to.

Yeah.

Olin doesn't talk about it, I assume.

Well, they talk about vaping and yeah.

Okay.

All right. Well, while you're up there though, I was just going to ask. So when you have a repeat offender, do you, who do you, I'm just curious, like if we do keep having these repeat, if we have somebody that's repeatedly failing, how is that communicated? Yeah.

The prosecutor will be aware of that.

I'm just wondering as a board if we need to consider whether or not they get to keep their liquor license if they fail on a quarterly basis for a year. I would like to know that so that we can take some action so they understand that you can't have your liquor license in Clayton if you keep selling to minors. I'm just curious if we could build in some sort of

You know, we can report out.

Yeah, like and it's I think especially I like the idea that it sounds like our prosecuting attorney like added the step of like actually bringing in the manager or owner because that seems more likely to result in change.

Right yeah

in approach and know, and so you know, while it might be like a different individual who was at the cash register. You did it around prom and when you did on homecoming if it's happening at this place, then we would want to know that too, I think yeah.

We had some issues with some places during the pandemic. And we considered, I don't know what we ended up doing. Did we yank the liquor license from JP Fields?

We did have a brief suspension and

there was a fine in place as well. I think our friend was involved as well. But anyway, okay, great. I think this is good. And as we consider entertainment venues and other types of you know, operations. This could come in handy. Is

this something the board would like us to work on from a regulatory standpoint? So

I think what I heard from you is that we already have checkpoints at initial receipt of liquor license, annual renewal, and annual renewal of liquor license.

Like

there's

We don't look for smart training at that time.

No, but they have to do something. They have to file with the city. So we're not like building another process. It's just like as part of that process, you recertify. And I don't know what the chances are that... Like obviously they're having staff turnover and whatever, but it's at least a check. And then I guess the other thing I think about is if we... require, like, recertification or audit or that when there is a failure at a compliance check. That would be a good thing to build in. Like, have you actually been keeping up with this thing? Or were you just going to wait until right before your annual renewal to make everybody do it

again? And is there a, do they actually, when they get the renewal, is it a form that they fill out or something? Because it could be added on there, affirming that they've done it. that they're in full compliance with

that. Actually, one of our detectives will run background checks on the people applying for the liquor license. So I guess that could be one of the checks we do is the training and then any past violations.

I think the only stone unturned is whether we want to do it just for the managers or like the bartenders or we want to include all servers.

My comment on that would be similar to Becky's, is that when my kids have gotten jobs, they have several hours of online training they have to do anyway, or more than that. So adding it to their online training is not that big of a deal, even if they only last at the job for a couple

days. I guess one of my kids worked in a restaurant. I don't remember having any training, but she was over 21 and she probably had a clue Yeah. either way i'm neutral whatever you guys you know but we'll just give some direction to david about which way you want to do it can i can i just ask

lily if she wants to yes absolutely just real quick i really want to thank you for having this discussion anything we can do to keep alcohol out of kids hands is something we need to focus on especially in clayton we do have a problem in clayton that's why i have this job and have the funding that i have um in 2021 samhsa did a review of the state of missouri in terms of what alcohol policies we have in place to reduce underage access accidents, deaths, all of that. And I can share this report with you all. I brought an extra copy. They rate all of our policies and indicate areas where we could be doing better. And responsible seller server training for everybody who sells is one of the recommendations that we do not have at the state level. Some of the other things that we do not are the social host ordinance, which we don't have at the state-level, but you have in Clayton. Compliance checks, which are not mandated at the state level, but we do have in Clayton, We're doing a lot to move in the right direction. We've got to close the gaps. We have 24% of high school students reported drinking in the last 30 days, overwhelmingly report that it's very easy to get here. And I think neighboring communities know that it's accessible here. So just wanted to share that. And the smart training there is also a feature on there where folks can test out. So if this is something they already have knowledge and training on, they can test out from the get-go.

have a feel from your surveys and work in the community whether or not it's easy to hear is it easy to buy at retail or is it easy to get from somebody else that bought it at retail

Yes.

Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, we're tackling part of the problem as well. Yeah.

And when you talked about vapes, vapes are really predominantly being purchased by someone over the age of 21 and then they're distributing to minors alcohol that happens that way. But, you know, they know they're getting fake IDs online. They're buying them from China two at a time. They're very sophisticated. Frankly, you know, Missouri doesn't have the budget to keep their scanning there. I show me ID app up to date, but they're doing their best. um that technology is just really advanced and we need folks that know it's it's more than just scanning that id you need to really know how to look at it and see if it's a fake id or just know who to ask in the first place and i think building a culture where we take this seriously and clayton is going to shift it it's not going to happen overnight but yeah

yeah i mean i feel like lillian i talked about how she took somebody like to somewhere in washington missouri it was like a gas station or something and took somebody that looked 15 and walked in and he didn't sell it to her and they were leaving. So they left, like, it's not like they said, aha, good job. You know, they just walked out and left and he came running out and he's like, I did it right. You're, you're one of the checkers. Right. So I, I was like, I want it to be like that here because I mean, people, high school students are drinking like crazy. So I want people to be aware that, you know, we are taking it seriously here. Yeah.

And I always try to remind folks, you know, we are dealing with an opioid epidemic. Overdoses are the number one cause of death in Clayton. 90% of adults with a substance use disorder started as a teenager with alcohol, nicotine, and cannabis. If we can address alcohol, we can save lives. Like it's that cut and dry.

Okay. Yeah. Very good. Thank you. I'm glad you came up and shared with us. All right. So it sounds like we want servers as well.

Great.

i think so i mean i trust we'll hear from our retail and restaurant community if they have concerns about it and we can consider what they say i mean we're not voting today yeah

we'll draft something and put it on for another discussion session and refine it from there and make sure that we're hitting the target with it before you put it on for adoption

yeah also it's prospective you're stopping it versus clamping down with higher fines and losing licenses so it's a proactive

We

have the list of everyone with a license, so we'll make sure we have a good sample set and that they get a copy of whatever the board will receive when we go into that discussion session.

Yeah, so when we go into it, when it's on our agenda, they'll get some advance notice so they can show up if they'd like.

Correct, and we'll do that meeting prior to it being on for final adoption.

Okay, very good.

Okay, excellent. So we'll move on to the next item, which is property maintenance and tenant bill of rights. So this is a little bit of a continuation from a discussion that we had during our retreat. So we did talk about property maintenance. Tenant bill of rights was mentioned, and it was on our list of things to look at over the next year or so. We figured tonight or this afternoon would be a great time to bring this forward, and Mayor Harris and I had several conversations on property maintenance as a part of housing preservation and retaining the affordable housing that we have in certain areas. So Just wanted to start with a little bit of information on our occupancy program. So residential occupancy permits are required for all rental units. There are a few cities in the area that require occupancy permits for both rental units and owner-occupied structures. Here in the city of Clayton, I would say the norm is to just have it for rental properties. The inspection is required upon change of tenant. After five years, if you have the same tenant prior to the sale of a rental property and then for condominium conversions, we don't get too many of these. Change of tenant obviously is the one that triggers this the most. In order to start this process, the property owner would apply through the CitizenServe portal. So they have to enter the property address, the unit number, the tenant's name, and then the contact information for either that property owner or the property manager that takes care of the site. They request an occupancy inspection. So we send an inspector out to the building. They'll address the site as a whole, but then also the individual unit where that tenant will live. The inspector emails the results and determine if there's any reinspection that's required. So if there's something that fails, if it's really, really minor, we may issue some sort of temporary occupancy for the tenant. If it's a major problem, then we would hold up that occupancy at that point in time. And then we make sure that, again, that tenant name is added to the permit when it is issued. So if you pass an inspection, it's valid for 90 days if we don't have the tenant name at the outset. So if you put a place up for rent, you could get the inspection 90 days prior to somebody actually moving in, but you do have to update that tenant name when a tenant comes in. Otherwise, the permit is then, or the occupancy is then invalidated and they would have to go through that process again. As far as the inspections themselves, what we're looking for is minimum standards. So again, finding that they're in compliance with the following codes. So we're not looking at the quality of materials, those types of things. We're really looking at life health safety issues that are covered by the International Residential Code, the International Property Maintenance Code, And you'll note here that we switched to the 21 code for the fire code, the building code, the international residential code earlier this year, maybe end of last year. But anyhow, we're on the 21s there now. We will soon be moving over to the 21 international property maintenance code. So that'll be coming before the Board of Aldermen. We look at any kind of life safety ordinances that we have, habitable unit property maintenance ordinances as well. We review the status of the property and the owner. So we're looking for outstanding code enforcement violations that that owner may have in other parts of the city. So perhaps leveraging the new permit to make sure we get compliance to the existing locations. So that's what we're checking against when we go in and look at individual units. And then here are some of the specific things that we're looking for. So on the inside, we're looking at the building condition. So the foundation walls, making sure there aren't big cracks that could be structural in nature. Make sure that you actually have doors, that you actually have windows, that they're not broken or screens missing, those types of things. We'll look at the surfaces, the paint, the plaster, look for rust combustibles, and then again, doors and hardware to make sure that all of that, including the locks are functioning properly. We make sure that the handrails, guardrails and step conditions are all good so that we don't have trip hazards there. And that when you grab a handrail that it's not shaky and about to fall over. We look for trash, rubbish, garbage within the building. We look for signs of rodent or pest infestation and then plumbing, electrical and mechanical. We need to make sure that all of the appliances are functioning, that the outlets that are next to water are GFI protected. So we'll go and check those and make sure it's actually working with the device the inspectors carry. We will look at the electric panel, water, heat, bathroom, kitchen facilities. So toilets are flushing, the faucets are running, that all of those fixtures are operating as they should. And then finally those safety items, smoke detectors, operable windows. And then we also calculate the number of occupants that are permitted based upon the square footage of that particular unit. So those are things we're looking at on the interior. And then on the exterior, so general sanitation, making sure you don't have big accumulations of yard waste or garbage. The drainage, this is a big one, making sure that the gutters and downspouts are connected properly, that we don't have stagnant water on the site, no water damages occurring, you don't have mosquito problems. Driveways and walkways, making sure those are in good repair. Trees and landscaping, make sure that we don't have overgrowth of weeds, that everything on the site is in good health. And then again, looking for signs of rodents or pests. And then if they have garages, fences, retaining walls, swimming pools, that all those things are in good repair and safe condition. So those are the things, again, we're looking for on the site. All of this is backed up by the residential code and the property maintenance code that the city has adopted. So a pretty comprehensive inspection process that we go through. As far as the department itself, we do have one inspector primarily assigned to residential occupancy and property maintenance. This is across the city, so we're not well-staffed in this area. If we were to expand, certainly, to take on owner-occupied properties in addition to rental, we would need to talk about staffing at that point. I think at some point we probably need to talk about it. Anyhow, just with the number of building inspections we have going on, code enforcement, as we talked about before, we are entirely reactive. So we're not doing any proactive code enforcement whatsoever. Unless they're driving past something on the way to an inspection that's absolutely egregious, we're not out just checking different wards or different neighborhoods on a regular basis to see if properties are in compliance. So all four of our inspectors are trained and able to perform any of these functions. They all hold those certifications, but we have one that's assigned on a regular basis. Those occupancy inspections are performed at the request of the property owner or manager. So again, we don't have a good compliance check system here. Not a lot's going on that's proactive. They actually have to call us and say, hey, I'm switching out a tenant. It's time for this. Otherwise, unless there's a five-year trigger, which is a really long time, and you may switch tenants three or four times within that five-year window, if they're not calling us, we don't know those tenants are switching out and we're not performing the inspections at that time. So again, I would... associate a lot of that with just the lack of staffing to get to that proactive level. And then finally, code enforcement investigations can be initiated by inspectors, staff, or residents. A lot of times these are called in by residents. We all get those calls, those emails where somebody tells us about a property that's around them. We certainly will send an inspector out. We'll see things from the right-of-way. And then finally – and this is what we'll talk about with tenant bill of rights – when we get into that and what Maplewood's put together, is letting renters know what their responsibilities and their rights are. Because if a renter does call us and they say they have an issue and they give the inspector permission to enter the unit, then we'll go in there and see what we've got. So we do, in a sense, advocate on their behalf and make sure that the unit they are in complies with all of these basic standards that I highlighted here. So it's letting renters know that they have that ability to call us because we don't get as many of those calls as you might expect. And then finally, in code enforcement, enforcement technical codes, requirements, ensuring compliance, all of those things. That's what we're trying to do there. The goals are protect the occupants, preserve the character of the neighborhoods, maintain our housing stock, prevent nuisances. But generally, what we're doing is protecting, again, health, safety, and welfare of our residents. A nuisance is a condition which causes a hazard or some detriment to public health, safety and welfare. So the condition must rise above merely aesthetic. So something just doesn't look good if it's outdated, whatever it may be. You know, it has some kind of issue that's purely cosmetic but doesn't actually cause any sort of safety issue or could lead to damage in the long term. That wouldn't necessarily be a nuisance or something we would handle through code enforcement. and then general procedures for abatement. So when we do have a violation, and this is just kind of a recap from the retreat, we do start with written notice, which is reasonably calculated to reach the intended recipient. So again, we're always sending this to the property owner, but if there's a property management company, we try to research to see exactly who might be in charge so that this is getting in the right hands and can get the proper attention. The The owner or possessor then has the opportunity to be heard by a representative of the city. So we get those calls all the time where we can kind of walk through what the issue is that needs to be mitigated. And then we have to give a reasonable timeframe for abatement, minimum of 10 days. So when we do something for tall grass or weeds, we give them 10 days to comply. We always put it at the absolute minimum. But the reasonable time depends on conditions to be abated and other considerations such as weather conditions. So if you have a house that paints one that comes up quite a bit near the dead of winter, we're usually going to let that person wait until spring to go in and mitigate that. if it's too cold to paint or fix whatever that issue is. And then finally, if it comes to it, then we could have findings and determination of a nuisance after hearing. We can do that through municipal court. We can issue a summons and then ultimately a fine, although we are capped on the amount of those fines at $500. So if it's a major issue, you know, we always have the property owner here or there that, you know, it's 500 bucks. I'll just let it ride. And it makes it very difficult to actually enforce these things. So those are the procedures for abatement, kind of an overview of code enforcement. But just want to open up for questions and discussion, at least this part of it, especially as it relates to our rental program and those occupancy checks. We have Anna Krane, our Director of Planning and Development Services here as well. Her department actually performs these inspections. So if you have technical questions, I may lean on Anna a little bit to answer those, but I'll open it up.

Okay, excellent. So we'll move on to the next item, which is property maintenance and tenant bill of rights. So this is a little bit of a continuation from a discussion that we had during our retreat. So we did talk about property maintenance. Tenant bill of rights was mentioned, and it was on our list of things to look at over the next year or so. We figured tonight or this afternoon would be a great time to bring this forward, and Mayor Harris and I had several conversations on property maintenance as a part of housing preservation and retaining the affordable housing that we have in certain areas. So Just wanted to start with a little bit of information on our occupancy program. So residential occupancy permits are required for all rental units. There are a few cities in the area that require occupancy permits for both rental units and owner-occupied structures. Here in the city of Clayton, I would say the norm is to just have it for rental properties. The inspection is required upon change of tenant. After five years, if you have the same tenant prior to the sale of a rental property and then for condominium conversions, we don't get too many of these. Change of tenant obviously is the one that triggers this the most. In order to start this process, the property owner would apply through the CitizenServe portal. So they have to enter the property address, the unit number, the tenant's name, and then the contact information for either that property owner or the property manager that takes care of the site. They request an occupancy inspection. So we send an inspector out to the building. They'll address the site as a whole, but then also the individual unit where that tenant will live. The inspector emails the results and determine if there's any reinspection that's required. So if there's something that fails, if it's really, really minor, we may issue some sort of temporary occupancy for the tenant. If it's a major problem, then we would hold up that occupancy at that point in time. And then we make sure that, again, that tenant name is added to the permit when it is issued. So if you pass an inspection, it's valid for 90 days if we don't have the tenant name at the outset. So if you put a place up for rent, you could get the inspection 90 days prior to somebody actually moving in, but you do have to update that tenant name when a tenant comes in. Otherwise, the permit is then, or the occupancy is then invalidated and they would have to go through that process again. As far as the inspections themselves, what we're looking for is minimum standards. So again, finding that they're in compliance with the following codes. So we're not looking at the quality of materials, those types of things. We're really looking at life health safety issues that are covered by the International Residential Code, the International Property Maintenance Code, And you'll note here that we switched to the 21 code for the fire code, the building code, the international residential code earlier this year, maybe end of last year. But anyhow, we're on the 21s there now. We will soon be moving over to the 21 international property maintenance code. So that'll be coming before the Board of Aldermen. We look at any kind of life safety ordinances that we have, habitable unit property maintenance ordinances as well. We review the status of the property and the owner. So we're looking for outstanding code enforcement violations that that owner may have in other parts of the city. So perhaps leveraging the new permit to make sure we get compliance to the existing locations. So that's what we're checking against when we go in and look at individual units. And then here are some of the specific things that we're looking for. So on the inside, we're looking at the building condition. So the foundation walls, making sure there aren't big cracks that could be structural in nature. Make sure that you actually have doors, that you actually have windows, that they're not broken or screens missing, those types of things. We'll look at the surfaces, the paint, the plaster, look for rust combustibles, and then again, doors and hardware to make sure that all of that, including the locks are functioning properly. We make sure that the handrails, guardrails and step conditions are all good so that we don't have trip hazards there. And that when you grab a handrail that it's not shaky and about to fall over. We look for trash, rubbish, garbage within the building. We look for signs of rodent or pest infestation and then plumbing, electrical and mechanical. We need to make sure that all of the appliances are functioning, that the outlets that are next to water are GFI protected. So we'll go and check those and make sure it's actually working with the device the inspectors carry. We will look at the electric panel, water, heat, bathroom, kitchen facilities. So toilets are flushing, the faucets are running, that all of those fixtures are operating as they should. And then finally those safety items, smoke detectors, operable windows. And then we also calculate the number of occupants that are permitted based upon the square footage of that particular unit. So those are things we're looking at on the interior. And then on the exterior, so general sanitation, making sure you don't have big accumulations of yard waste or garbage. The drainage, this is a big one, making sure that the gutters and downspouts are connected properly, that we don't have stagnant water on the site, no water damages occurring, you don't have mosquito problems. Driveways and walkways, making sure those are in good repair. Trees and landscaping, make sure that we don't have overgrowth of weeds, that everything on the site is in good health. And then again, looking for signs of rodents or pests. And then if they have garages, fences, retaining walls, swimming pools, that all those things are in good repair and safe condition. So those are the things, again, we're looking for on the site. All of this is backed up by the residential code and the property maintenance code that the city has adopted. So a pretty comprehensive inspection process that we go through. As far as the department itself, we do have one inspector primarily assigned to residential occupancy and property maintenance. This is across the city, so we're not well-staffed in this area. If we were to expand, certainly, to take on owner-occupied properties in addition to rental, we would need to talk about staffing at that point. I think at some point we probably need to talk about it. Anyhow, just with the number of building inspections we have going on, code enforcement, as we talked about before, we are entirely reactive. So we're not doing any proactive code enforcement whatsoever. Unless they're driving past something on the way to an inspection that's absolutely egregious, we're not out just checking different wards or different neighborhoods on a regular basis to see if properties are in compliance. So all four of our inspectors are trained and able to perform any of these functions. They all hold those certifications, but we have one that's assigned on a regular basis. Those occupancy inspections are performed at the request of the property owner or manager. So again, we don't have a good compliance check system here. Not a lot's going on that's proactive. They actually have to call us and say, hey, I'm switching out a tenant. It's time for this. Otherwise, unless there's a five-year trigger, which is a really long time, and you may switch tenants three or four times within that five-year window, if they're not calling us, we don't know those tenants are switching out and we're not performing the inspections at that time. So again, I would... associate a lot of that with just the lack of staffing to get to that proactive level. And then finally, code enforcement investigations can be initiated by inspectors, staff, or residents. A lot of times these are called in by residents. We all get those calls, those emails where somebody tells us about a property that's around them. We certainly will send an inspector out. We'll see things from the right-of-way. And then finally – and this is what we'll talk about with tenant bill of rights – when we get into that and what Maplewood's put together, is letting renters know what their responsibilities and their rights are. Because if a renter does call us and they say they have an issue and they give the inspector permission to enter the unit, then we'll go in there and see what we've got. So we do, in a sense, advocate on their behalf and make sure that the unit they are in complies with all of these basic standards that I highlighted here. So it's letting renters know that they have that ability to call us because we don't get as many of those calls as you might expect. And then finally, in code enforcement, enforcement technical codes, requirements, ensuring compliance, all of those things. That's what we're trying to do there. The goals are protect the occupants, preserve the character of the neighborhoods, maintain our housing stock, prevent nuisances. But generally, what we're doing is protecting, again, health, safety, and welfare of our residents. A nuisance is a condition which causes a hazard or some detriment to public health, safety and welfare. So the condition must rise above merely aesthetic. So something just doesn't look good if it's outdated, whatever it may be. You know, it has some kind of issue that's purely cosmetic but doesn't actually cause any sort of safety issue or could lead to damage in the long term. That wouldn't necessarily be a nuisance or something we would handle through code enforcement. and then general procedures for abatement. So when we do have a violation, and this is just kind of a recap from the retreat, we do start with written notice, which is reasonably calculated to reach the intended recipient. So again, we're always sending this to the property owner, but if there's a property management company, we try to research to see exactly who might be in charge so that this is getting in the right hands and can get the proper attention. The The owner or possessor then has the opportunity to be heard by a representative of the city. So we get those calls all the time where we can kind of walk through what the issue is that needs to be mitigated. And then we have to give a reasonable timeframe for abatement, minimum of 10 days. So when we do something for tall grass or weeds, we give them 10 days to comply. We always put it at the absolute minimum. But the reasonable time depends on conditions to be abated and other considerations such as weather conditions. So if you have a house that paints one that comes up quite a bit near the dead of winter, we're usually going to let that person wait until spring to go in and mitigate that. if it's too cold to paint or fix whatever that issue is. And then finally, if it comes to it, then we could have findings and determination of a nuisance after hearing. We can do that through municipal court. We can issue a summons and then ultimately a fine, although we are capped on the amount of those fines at $500. So if it's a major issue, you know, we always have the property owner here or there that, you know, it's 500 bucks. I'll just let it ride. And it makes it very difficult to actually enforce these things. So those are the procedures for abatement, kind of an overview of code enforcement. But just want to open up for questions and discussion, at least this part of it, especially as it relates to our rental program and those occupancy checks. We have Anna Crane, our Director of Planning and Development Services here as well. Her department actually performs these inspections. So if you have technical questions, I may lean on Anna a little bit to answer those, but I'll open it up.

But we had a situation a couple of weeks back where somebody had come in, they were looking for an extension on the rehab of their house, and we had a homeowner saying that they had come into court and they didn't do anything. Nothing got done. She had a situation that her – I dare ask this question. MS. It

was the ADU request, right? MR. Yeah. MS.

If we have this in place, why was nothing or seemingly nothing seemed to have been done to cause her to fix up or do what she should have done on her property? I

would say it's more of a court issue than a staff issue. I mean, we issued all the necessary paperwork, summons, submit everything to court. Once it's in the court's hands, at that point, it's kind of staff hands off. So We didn't have compliance with them actually showing up to court for a while. And then you have other cases where a judge may issue a continuance and give them extra time to mitigate whatever the issue is.

So in

this case, I mean, that's kind of what dragged us out was we had somebody that really wasn't going to court and there were extensions issued. So there wasn't a sense of urgency, I would say, within the court. to get compliance in that particular case.

I think what happened there, also what David alluded to, is that the fine is not substantial enough to get people to take it seriously. To some extent, if they're not ready to do something, they'd rather not show up, take the fine. I mean, that house still has a stop work order in it. Now it's a month since we approved the ADU and the rest of it, and still nothing is happening. So I believe I heard from the judge December 14th is the next... and it's supposed to be a trial date, so it's sort of been elevated to the next step. But I don't know from the judge exactly what the potential penalty is on the day of the trial either. We still seem to be at the court level very limited in what we can do.

It's still going to be that $500. So once that $500 fine is levied, you basically start that process over again. So that's why these things just get... get dragged out you can if somebody's not showing you can issue a benchmark after a

certain amount of times you can't issue a benchmark yeah

right

for

residential yeah

right yeah so that that's what happened in that particular situation

we need to raise the fine limit or

we can't we're

capped it's part of

the post ferguson senate bill five um there you have cities out there that were issuing fines for everything in the world at all kinds of amounts and essentially generating revenue through code enforcement. And so the result is an overall statewide cap that impacts the cities

to do it right. I think it may be getting to a different topic, but I think what the judge mentioned to me on this is am I going to be at a point as the judge to issue a bench warrant sort of gets into the same thing with traffic tickets? Is that my only real remedy is because the fine is so capped, do I issue a bench warrant just to sort of make life miserable for these people because they keep blowing us off? And I think he was uncertain about is that the right remedy, but I'm not sure what else to do.

What's the remedy if they don't pay the fine?

Same

question.

Right, not a whole lot more.

I just had a question, though, related to this. So if the property owner isn't calling us to do the inspections, then they could potentially be just re-renting to people over and over again. without any inspections for years, really.

That's correct. And that's why we'll talk about the Bill of Rights here in a moment. I mean, that's something that Maplewood advertises heavily because you are dependent upon those owners calling. If they're switching somebody out after nine months, if they're not calling you, there's no way the city is going to be aware that there's been any kind of change in and occupancy there. It'd be a whole lot easier if we had utilities, which we don't. Because if you had utilities and that was switching in somebody's name, then you would see that particular change and you know the tenant has been swapped out. In this particular case, that's not how it works. Even with the trash billing where we would have access to those names, a trash bill in a multifamily property is going to go to the owner or to the property manager. So there's no good way for us to do the individual tenant checks.

David, if we get in there, the tenants moved in, we don't know about it, nobody calls us, then somebody next door calls and we finally, we're now six months since the tenant took over, we go over there, do the inspection, and actually the property's in decent shape. but they didn't call us, is that in and of itself a violation? Or do we say to the property manager, hey, you know, property looks okay, but you've had this person in there for six months. You never called us. So is that enough teeth to actually do anything to make them not have that happen again?

We do have an increased permit fee if an occupant moved in before this process. So again, it's not really... super significant in terms of the monetary value, but we do add an additional fee on for those cases. And if it was a process of we found out and were able to prove that a tenant has moved in without getting an occupancy permit, they would be in violation. So then we would start a code enforcement process against them and eventually hopefully get to abatement by getting an actual occupancy permit for that tenant.

Against the tenant, right? Not the owner?

No, that would be against the owner of the property.

Landlord.

Mm-hmm.

I thought you just made reference to the tenant.

So it would, if, for example, if a tenant moved in and they found out that they were supposed to have an occupancy permit, one of the most common ones, most of the time people don't even realize what an occupancy permit does for them as a renter unless they have children that are enrolling in the school district. Then that becomes a piece that they can provide to the school district to verify residency to enroll their child. So oftentimes, unless you have a child, you're not really looking for that piece of paper from your landlord that says that you're an occupant. But if a tenant were to say, I don't have an occupancy permit, then the code enforcement would be against the property itself, not the tenant. And we could go through the process of getting them an occupancy permit. A That rarely happens. But as long as they have a lease, so they're a lawful tenant of that space, they can provide us access to the property. So they could themselves apply for their own permit and go through that process.

That's a good question. I'm Not necessarily in terms of having an Excel spreadsheet. We could generate one fairly easily in CitizenServe. That's our database that is connected to St. Louis County's parcel records. So CitizenServe in itself, every time we enter a permit into that file, we can connect it directly back to St. Louis county's parcel ID for that. And so that's kind of how we connect the property ownership information with units. So, a little, we can access the database so to speak of them but we don't run our own separate database and

We can run a report like that through CitizenServe. So we can run reports that will tell us If there are occupancy permits that are outstanding that have had the same tenant for five years or we can run it by the property so we could look for that property and see all the occupancy permits that have been run. And kind of the way we operate it is you're in our database, the residential occupancy permit is under the issued status. as long as that's associated with a tenant. So then when we get a request for a new occupant of that same unit number or house or property address, then the old tenant occupancy permit is changed to closed status and we open and issue a new one. So that's kind of part of the check is understanding that, but I'm not sure at this point we would need a separate database to run one of those reports like you're talking about. The piece would be if there are buildings that maybe were or units within a building that were owner occupied and became renter occupied. So we do have some condominiums in the city that do allow their owners to rent out those units in particular. Those ones are a little bit harder for us to necessarily track whether or not tenants have changed because we're not regularly visiting that building. And so our inspectors are usually less, you know, they know that unit less compared to other buildings where we have regular occupancy inspections in them. So that would be the hard one to track.

Yeah, so it occurs to me that we only know a property or unit is... a rental property if the owner applies for an occupancy permit,

right? Like, I mean, I

could start renting out my house legally and not tell you, I would never do that. I'm going to stay in my house. That's wonderful. But like, you wouldn't know unless the tenant or a neighbor called. So that would be one thing too, like neighbors could like, yeah. Yeah.

Yes, it would be, it would be difficult to find out.

Yeah.

And that's another one that's really hard for us even from an observation standpoint so even if we did necessarily have the staff so somebody could just purely be trying to figure that out. It's really I mean what are the, you know, how do you observe a pattern that identifies that this person's a renter or a new renter, when you think about how many units we have in our city. yeah even if we dedicated a person to that it's going to be really hard for sure

yeah that's what i don't know so for every single unit that's turned over at 212 or the barton like you we send an inspector over we do and i just i don't know how you have enough manpower to do all that it

is uh those ones are the the bigger buildings it honestly is really tied to the property manager. So some of the buildings have great property managers and they're really on top of it. And there's a system that's worked out and they pay, and then that property manager will leave. And we, we become quickly aware of it because those are buildings where we are very frequently entering to do a reoccupancy. And so for example, Clayton on the park had a new property manager who was running this and we Our inspector was like, it's been a little while since I've done any reoccupancies in Clayton-on-the-Park. That seems a little fishy. And so then we really got pretty backed up because we were sending a lot of violation notices to Clayton-on the Park. They needed those reoccupancies and they weren't following through. We're pretty much caught up now, but those are kind of easier to tell because they know they should be spending time in that building.

It just seems like, I mean, I just can't imagine all the rental units that are turning over all the time. I don't know how... You have enough people to do all that.

So what triggers the

five-year inspection? So that's similar to what Rich was looking for. We're able to run a report, so we'll kind of know, okay, this occupancy permit was issued five years ago and it's still in the issued status, which means that we don't have an occupancy permit for that same unit less than five years old. And we'll send a notice to the property manager that we have on file saying that we need to come in to do a reoccurrency inspection.

And you run that report annually, so you can do that?

Yes. Our permit technician, there's a myriad of reports that are similar and that we're trying to catch up with some of the expiration dates of permits and that sort of thing. So I will say it's... on the priority of reports, probably lower. That five-year trigger is not something that we're running every week or every month. I would say we try and do it at least twice to three times a year. So

the question is, if that's the only way we can get in and check a property other than the sort of inconsistent occupancy permit requests. Do we have to do it every five years? Let's put manpower aside for a second. Can we do it every two

years or

every two and a

half years? I believe that was one of our local amendments. I'd have to double check on where that policy is. You have a series of local amendments to the IRC, our residential code and our property maintenance code that modify some of the procedures related to how we enforce those codes and then also add other more specific codes for us. And I don't remember exactly where it is, but I think that might be in our local amendments. So wherever it is. if it's a policy or a code amendment, one of the two, we would have to change that. But it would be- We could. I mean, we can make local amendments. We can change all these codes, so we could do it. We would definitely need to evaluate what we think the impacts of that would be. Of course, yeah. But we can do local amendment changes like that.

Yeah. I mean, I just, you know, I do think we've got, particularly in Ward 1 and also in Ward 2 in the Morelands, we've got some properties- I can say just from personal experience, they're practically falling down. Although they may not have cracks that are visible. They're in very bad shape. And if we continue to let them decline, they'll be obviously torn down and a brand new shiny building will go in and the rent will go way up. So that's kind of the big strategic, one of the big strategic goals here. And so, I don't know, we just have to decide as a community if we care enough about that to make the investment that would be required

that would help so uh you know the more that we're inside of a building for those reactancies the more that we are going to look at that individual unit however we are still only enforcing kind of those minimum standards of everything and so there's a lot of buildings that meet the minimum standards they're providing the elements of a habitable unit their their life safety measures are are fixed and a lot of times the fixes that you see to those measures in rental units are not the same way that you would personally fix your own house or condominium. So just inspecting more often is not necessarily going to correlate with an increased standard of some of those. Things

like leaking ceilings, windows that don't operate.

Yep.

electrical connections that don't operate properly. I

think the bigger impact to all of that will be more of the tenant Bill of Rights aspect to it, because we do hear a lot, a resident will call and they'll say, this appliance you know their hot water heater has not really been functioning properly for six months or something and they're just calling us well they could have called us significantly earlier but we do have a lot of renters that say well we want you to come and look at this but don't say it was me because they're afraid of some of the retribution which you know they That is not the correct legal way. It would be for an owner to go after a renter who reported an issue, a code violation. They've probably

been calling the property manager. They

probably have, but that would be a big, I think that would potentially be more of an impact is how can we help renters understand they can't what they can call us for and what authority they do have as a legal renter of that property for us to to intervene um a little bit sooner for some of those issues and that might help more because even if we're doing our re occupancy inspections less than five years honestly in the majority of our buildings in clayton we don't have renters in the same unit for five years. So we are visiting most of our units more often than every five years. Some of the older buildings we do, but especially in the newer buildings and then more of the student where we get more student housing, graduate student level housing, they're not typically in their units for five years.

But you're only doing the ones that apply for permits.

Right. So this one is kind of interesting and I don't know exactly the legal language here, but there is protection for renters. So if they are living in a unit and it no longer meets our standards of a habitable unit. So for example, they don't have hot water because something is broken. Their landlord is supposed to relocate them, put them up in a hotel or otherwise provide them with a habitable living space if they're under a lease. So that's when we do hear, well, they'll kick us out. Well, because of your legal right to live in a habitable unit that you're renting from them, they need to provide you with that habitable unit somewhere else if it's not a quick fix. So that is something that could also be in the bill, because I don't think most tenants know that. And so a lot of times- When those more severe issues come to us, usually our building official, Tom Lard, is involved in the corrective action a lot sooner than for some of our smaller code enforcement cases. And so he's really good at speaking with tenants and reminding them of their rights in some of those aspects. And so I think he could probably, just off the top of his head, given his years of experience, list a few items that would be good for us to provide renters ahead of time. Good.

In that circumstance, for instance, though, I think a lot of times people look to us for the city to penalize other... For instance, in a residential neighborhood, somebody's encroached a fence or something like that. And people say, okay, we'll now do something about it. Or who's going to pay for this? So in that circumstance, though, yes, they're entitled to move themselves into a hotel. But then if... they're paying for it. The

owner isn't, the landlord is supposed to move them.

Right. So, but if they themselves move themselves because the landlord won't pay for it, we can't then force the landlord to pay. Like it's a civil action between them. That's where we're kind of hamstringed.

We are. And there's a lot of matters, especially with code enforcement that start to get into that civil realm where we can cite them for violating our codes and But there are a lot of times where there's also an element of kind of private agreement between those civil parties.

So I know people who are friends who now it's not their kids, but their grandkids who say they've you know, they now live in Clayton and they're in their 20s and they're just starting out. And the comment has been, you know, they've sort of suggested to the landlord, you know, this place really could use a little sprucing up modernizing, etc. And the response is, and it may be BS or maybe for real as well. You know, if I did that and I spent a lot of money, obviously I'm going to have to significantly increase your rent next time. Or, you know, if when your term is up, I got plenty of other people to lease this to because it's a very desirable place. So unfortunately, I think there is that sort of economic issue also from the landlord perspective is they're saying, yeah, if it's not a code violation, the place could be modernized, spruced up, be a lot nicer, but it's going to cost me a bunch of money. I'm going to pass it through to you and you won't like that either. And so then it runs counter to our whole desire to create some more attainable or affordable housing so these things tend to be at cross purposes i just think we need to unfortunately consider that as well

but i mean in my in my mind i'm thinking about more of the things that have been listed here that are more in the habitable you know like i mentioned it's not the putting in the uh you know new finishes of granite countertops and stuff it's it's the basic stuff that i think we experience when our daughter rented for example it was just it was really deplorable and um leaking roofs and all kinds of stuff that uh yeah that were never fixed yeah so anyways it'd be great if we can because that kind of damage over years obviously you know runs the whole building down and it makes it less you know less viable

Well, I think I want to get into the weeds too much, but I think as long as, so as long as you can run your, you know, have your lights on and your dishwasher at the same time, or, you know, uh, your, your air window, one window air conditioner can run at the same time as you have your lights on, you know, those are just some basic things. And I don't know if they're covered, but you don't

have to provide air conditioning or a dishwasher to meet habitable standards. I just want to be clear, like the remedy in that situation would be taking out the thing. I mean, for a cheap landlord. Yeah.

where they

would remedy an electrical issue like that by taking out their

Well, I mean, I think we're doing what we feel we can to be more proactive. Unfortunately, we're very limited in that obviously based on what's been said, right? So I think the Tenant Bill of Rights is a great way for us to respond within our current framework, which is we only respond to complaints. We don't proactively go and inspect.

I think that, yeah, and it's a tenant bill of rights. By tenants knowing what their rights are, it's not necessarily that we're making things requiring a dishwasher or granite countertops. The tenants now know, and the tenants can act upon that and not just kind of defer and keep bugging the landlord who's not doing anything. And I'm also curious, do you know what type of experience Maplewood has had since they enacted this? I do not.

I actually think it's interesting to think about too, like the, and this is certainly the case in Ward 1 some where folks are in like condos or, you know, small multi-unit buildings, and one or two of their neighbors rent out the units, like Like, do those condo owners know that their fellow owners who are now renting should be following this process? And that if they have any concerns about the like quality of how the unit is being held up, they could call and make sure the city knows that it's now a rental unit and it should be inspected as such. No,

they probably don't. I think it's probably been, I couldn't think of a time where we've kind of actively as a city put out to residents or property owners here.

Because condo owners will be motivated. If they think a neighbor is doing something that's going to impact something they have to pay in the future because it's going to require a condo repair, I can imagine people I know being motivated in that circumstance.

No, and if we adopt this, it is a time that we can, when we publicize that, we can remind everyone that any rentals require the owner to get an occupancy permit for the new tenant coming in. And we may want to add that to what Maplewood has, remind the tenant that the owner should have gotten inspection of the occupancy permit to hand to them.

Yeah, right now all of the information about our process on our website is really people have to be looking – they have to come to our website to look for that information. We haven't really –

I think to put the Maplewood resolution in context, I think I remember the story. But, you know, I think there's a housing subcommittee of the CEC. And so we talked about this. So what was talked about conceptually is, hey, Maplewood's got a Bill of Rights. Let's get a hold of it. So I think Kathleen Gund volunteered to get a copy of it. We have a copy of it now. I believe that in about 10 days, there's a housing subcommittee meeting of which this is a topic for the subcommittee is to look at this document and see how relevant this is to what we're trying to do. Maybe to the question, explore what's Maplewood's experience been But so we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves, at least as far as this particular ordinance. Although I think the concept is a good one. I'm particularly struck by the fact that tenants don't realize that they have this opportunity to have an occupancy inspection. So, I mean, I think there's a reason for a bill of rights. I don't know that this document is the right one, but the CEC subcommittee is actually looking at it and maybe we ought to let that happen before we spend a lot of time on this particular

document. The purpose for sharing this with everyone today, and this is relatively new, they just passed it in August of this year. So they're just now going out and advertising this and there aren't a lot of examples of a tenant bill of rights within this area. They did not pass anything new when they put this together. So this is a resolution that's essentially a compilation of ordinances that they have in place, and then protections that are offered by state and federal law for renters. And they've put all of that in one document that they're sharing everywhere and trying to get in front of those tenants. So you can see just like right here on the screen share, they do call out their specific codes. So the property maintenance code, the international residential code, federal fair housing standards, freedom from discrimination and retaliation. So we have section 225 of our ordinance, which is all the human rights. So source of income, where we get into discriminatory practices, those types of things. they've essentially taken everything that they've had on that they have on the books and they added it here. So it, it's really, again, more of a compilation than new legislation that they've put forward. Uh, and that's all they were trying to do was just, here's a concise place where you can see all of the various rules that are out there associated with rentals. And, um, as, as Alderman Gary Feder had mentioned, this did come up at the last housing subcommittee meeting. It's just a possibility for the city of Clayton. But I think, um, even though it's early in their rollout, it's been well-received within the community and I think makes a lot of sense to put people on notice.

document. The purpose for sharing this with everyone today, and this is relatively new, they just passed it in August of this year. So they're just now going out and advertising this and there aren't a lot of examples of a tenant bill of rights within this area. They did not pass anything new when they put this together. So this is a resolution that's essentially a compilation of ordinances that they have in place, and then protections that are offered by state and federal law for renters. And they've put all of that in one document that they're sharing everywhere and trying to get in front of those tenants. So you can see just like right here on the screen share, they do call out their specific codes. So the property maintenance code, the international residential code, federal fair housing standards, freedom from discrimination and retaliation. So we have section 225 of our ordinance, which is all the human rights. So source of income, where we get into discriminatory practices, those types of things. they've essentially taken everything that they've had on that they have on the books and they added it here. So it, it's really, again, more of a compilation than new legislation that they've put forward. Uh, and that's all they were trying to do was just, here's a concise place where you can see all of the various rules that are out there associated with rentals. And, um, as, as Alderman Fader had mentioned, this did come up at the last housing subcommittee meeting. It's just a possibility for the city of Clayton. But I think, um, even though it's early in their rollout, it's been well-received within the community and I think makes a lot of sense to put people on notice.

Yeah, and Maplewood may be one of the first in the area, but certainly not first.

It's widespread throughout the

country. And given that, I appreciate very much what the Housing Subcommittee has done, CEC. It sounds like perhaps just the order is whatever. If the city is ready to work on this with our current legislation putting into our Bill of Rights, that might then help the CEC do that because the CEC doesn't have all that

I think the housing committee needs to hear some of what we heard today which is how does this work currently and so what aren't we doing so I think I think the housing subcommittee needs to catch up a little bit with us at this point and sort of evaluate what we're doing and then see what needs to be done

Well, I mean tell me if i'm wrong, but I mean I i'm happy for them to be you know right on right with us on this, but I mean, I think that we can there. There are lots of reasons to do something like this, that may or may not affect the equity commissions charge and so I don't see why we would need to wait. necessarily i would love for them to be up to speed on it that's not it but

i was just saying they're particular mostly with reference to this particular document there may be a lot we want to do i just think this document we'd be getting ahead of ourselves if we sort of work off this document

right now that's what we're saying we're saying that that our city would use our code to put in a bill of rights of what we do right it's just a model and it would follow

this form but it would be populated with our own information yeah

I can't think of anything conceivably all the new buildings that we would have absolutely no complaints from unless they forgot to install the window or, you know, I mean, you know, unless it finished and you moved in.

There are complaints in the new building.

You know, actually, I have actually heard from somebody that over the past year that they moved into a new building and it was unfinished and they had problem getting their unit finished. Probably that was somebody in the commercial building actually, now that I'm thinking of it. So yeah, I can't imagine it, but.

Yeah. I mean, this is just reiterating things that we already have codes that we already enforce. So it wouldn't really change anything from what our current process is. But I do think, you know, if we were to, make any changes, we definitely would need to understand what the implications are before we adopt those on a more widespread area. But yeah, this would just be filtering a lot of things that we have throughout our code. Yeah,

I mean, it seems to me, honestly, you could strike and obviously we're not saying this is our draft, but like strike the first three whereases, focus on the last one. We just want people to know what they have a right to, and so we're putting all this together, and we could send it to every address that we have an occupancy permit for, and then they have it. Easy.

I think it's just a great way to publish to people like you have a right, so if you're

not... Yeah, and then see what we learn.

Why wouldn't we want to still perhaps look at this and say, you know what, we'd like for tenants to have maybe some additional rights above what they already have? I mean, what would be wrong with that?

Nothing, but this would definitely make it a little easier because it will also give you, as the Board of Aldermen, one document that kind of outlines where everything stands today.

No, I understand that. I'm just saying looking at it and then maybe coming up with additional rights that tenants should have over and above what the Fair Housing Act says or what something else happens to say that we, of course, would follow.

Exactly.

I'm all for that. I would love to up our game wherever we possibly could. I look at some of the buildings I've driven by. They don't have a porch light. It's completely dark out in front. How could that possibly be safe? Anyway, I don't know that it's a requirement, though. Probably not.

You know, I do not know all of the requirements. If we could get the inspector or building official in here, they can list them all for you.

So I think this is great. I'm glad that you guys seem to support it and I'm hoping we can move forward with it, get it in place. And I hope that when we eventually, if we eventually do it, we'll have some good ways of communicating it besides a bunch of whereases because, you know, I can think of young people living in apartments that would look at that and go, OK. I can live with whatever Lily came up with. Well,

the ordinance would look like that because that's how ordinances look. But probably we have some good people in communications and graphics who could make it pretty

for when it goes out to residents. Yeah, and it really is just the communication piece because everything is already there. We're just putting it in forms of . Did

you know?

All right, very good. Thank you guys. Now we're going to talk about what the sustainable product purchasing policy, which I think all the woman abuse has been bugging us about. That's good. We have things for people. It might be something

we have the insight to bring to our agenda.

Exactly. She brought this up at the last meeting or maybe two meetings ago when we had our custodial contract that was on the agenda and asked the question about sustainable products.

Yeah, right.

Materials and chemicals and those sorts of things with which the city actually procures and we do have within our purchasing policy and, and really I think this is more for information than anything else and if the board wants us to review this document, we could certainly do that with the sustainability committee or within staff itself but again, just wanted to put this out there as information that back in 2007 so quite some time ago. I know some sustainability best practices have changed since then. And it's not something we talk about a lot. I thought it'd be good to get this in front of everyone again. This is pulled straight from our purchasing policy. This is what the Board of Aldermen had adopted at that point in time. Let me zoom out on this just a little bit. Hopefully you had a chance to look at this, if not again we don't need to make any decisions today or discuss it. In a ton of detail but it's it's basically set up where we've got a definition section here that goes through all the typical definitions that you would see related to sustainability. then we have procedures about when this policy takes effect, so for bid solicitations. So, for instance, in the RFP that we had for custodial services, there was mention of some of these requirements in there, and the contract reflects that as well. If we're purchasing goods, for instance, that may fall into this category, We do have mentions within those requests for bids or those RFPs that reference back to this particular document. But again, it's not something that we discuss when these things come forward to the Board of Aldermen. I would imagine looking at how this was put together because it talks about essentially preference being given for vendors that apply these principles or incorporate this into whatever product they may be selling. you know, we don't have a whole lot of conversation at the Board of Aldermen about those preferences or where this factors in. So again, this is more of a reminder, hey, we have this not just for the Board of Alderman, but I think staff as well to really incorporate this into the conversation. Again, I don't know if that was occurring, you know, back in 2007, 2010, or whenever this started to really fall off. But I can tell you in the next, the last four years. We've not really discussed it much. Perhaps those that have been around longer, I don't know if this was ever a regular part of our conversation, but I do think to some extent looking at how this was drafted, that was probably the intention at the time.

David, like as a word, because I don't always know, you know, we do these RFPs for things, you know, services largely, and I know there's obviously lots of products that get purchased by you and other members of the staff. Are we always trying to find the lowest price? You know, I'm just wondering like as we look at things to be more sustainable or environmentally friendly, I'm not suggesting that we pay twice as much for plates that are biodegradable, but paying 10 or 15% more, I think would be certainly acceptable to me. You know, I'm just wondering if there's any sort of deference given to more sustainable products even if they might cost a little bit more

yeah so a lot of times you will see within purchasing policies a specific amount that it's considered a bonus to some extent you know five percent bonus something like that on what their actual bid price is uh we don't have any mechanism like that for this particular In this particular instance, I think it's been used more of a checkbox than anything else. So if we ask for some sort of sustainable practice or we ask for something generally and they check that box, then we consider that bid to be responsive. So when we get bids, what we're looking for is the lowest responsive responsible bidder. So who's following the rules? Who's giving us what we'd like? And then if you're checking all those boxes and you've met all those requirements, then who has the lowest price? So it's kind of factored in that way, but I don't think it's really in practice taking on the effect of you'll get some sort of bonus if you do these things. I don't think that's a regular part of our conversation. However, if we wanted to make adjustments to this, I think that's certainly something we could discuss. There are a lot of different models out there where you see it for locally sourced goods as a common one or a local vendor may get some kind of bonus. Sustainable could be another element like that.

No. Yeah. I mean, even just thinking about, you know, as we move forward with the people that we employ, you know, cause our parks department can't take care of all of our parks. So, you know, having contracts with landscape companies that use um electric powered gas blow you know like leaf blowers and stuff i mean i know i'm thinking down the line but then you're having and they might cost a little bit more but you know we're not polluting our environment enough so i just it'd be nice to kind of think about giving deference in situations like that

but and that's figuring out how much do you want to incentivize that how much more are you willing to pay are you willing to uh typical gas powered leaf blowers that's something we can discuss and something you can build into a purchasing policy it's certainly more difficult to administer at that point but you do end up getting the result you're looking for in a lot of cases

aspect. I would say it's more aspirational or a checkbox in nature.

So I can tell you, I would like to know what best practices are. in other cities what models are out there for locally sourced or non-toxic cleaning things and things like that, and maybe update this policy if staff might think appropriate. And I don't know how we work in a – if there's a margin to get the more sustainable products at this point in time. I think long-term, a lot of things in sustainability are long-term savings, even though it may be more immediate costs now. So if we could look at updating this It also mentions in here training, personnel sufficient training about the environment and green procurement, and wondering if we can make sure that that is happening. And I don't know. It does seem that this was one of those resolutions you passed, and it's there in its checkbox. It doesn't even have to be a formal audit, but some type of going through its department and seeing what people are currently doing. So we have that baseline of what then we may want to do, what is the aspiration that we hope to reach and then actually put into practice. So being aware of it as the first step and then making it have some meaning would be great.

And I think the audit would indicate that we need a rebuild.

Okay. Well, if we know that already, we

just...

Yeah.

It's just not something we discuss on a regular basis. And again, if it was, if it was a... a primary consideration for us. And that's something I think would be reflected in the RFBAs and more prominent in contracts and that sort of thing.

It's one of those actions that we can take that is not, that's very attainable. To some degree, to what degree we can do that with the purchasing we have and the awareness. So I appreciate that.

or procedure? I just brought that up as an example. But that's one that's fairly common, but it's more common in cities that have a wider variety of services than we have. So a lot of times you run into it like office supplies. If you have a local store, then you would prefer to... buy those goods from the local business rather than getting it from, you know, Staples or something online. But we don't have a lot of those. We don't buy much from Clayton businesses outside of really like professional services. So if we were going to look at something like that, I think would be geared more towards professional services than actual goods.

Well, that's an interesting point because we talk about our regional responsibility too. So locally sourced could go beyond the Clayton boundaries. But a lot of our things are done through the bigger purchasing bodies, right? We do a

whole lot through co-ops. And that's common of most municipalities at this point. It's a lot of state bids. It's a larger co-ops. Really what you're trying to do is get the efficiency there where you know you're getting the lowest price without having to go through a long drawn out bid process for everything you're buying. So that shortcut is really nice to have. One thing that we could look at is see if there's any co-ops that maybe have a sustainability focus or mindset or something like that, where it may make it a little bit easier to do those things as well. Maybe find a clearinghouse for that sort of thing. It could be out there. I don't know. I'm just saying there are a lot of different, there's a lot of different co-ops. So we may be able to find something like that. Certainly worth exploring.

i don't remember this but remind me if we if we're thinking of okay you know environmentally sustainable products and practices and if we're thinking about locally sourced products or services i'm not sure if we're including services in that Are we also thinking of minority-owned product, you know, companies that are minority-owned? Because, I mean, this whole thing, it all kind of starts to go hand in hand. And I don't even know if we – I can't remember that we ever discussed that or should we or whatever. It's just bringing that to mind.

Yeah, so that's something that we track, but it's not a requirement that they are. And there's no incentive that goes along with that. So we're still in the collection

process.

Is

that something the Equity Commission has looked at?

That

was a year and a half ago or so.

Okay, good. Yeah, we talked about that, and something else that always comes back to mind, some of the bigger companies had a provision because we don't always have control over with whom we're contracting, and some of the companies just wanted had some statement that they, I can't remember what it was. It was

a supplier diversity statement.

Supplier diversity statement.

Their own supplier diversity policy that they would have to furnish that along with their.

With their bid. With their

bid, right.

Okay. Well, so the next steps on this are, is.

We can work with this as staff. Is this something you'd like referred to sustainability to work on? Would you like to?

Like a

natural

cut? We could do that unless you think staff might have a better hands-on idea of awareness that the resolution is there and what's within the realm of what you can do with your contracting.

Yeah, I think we, I

mean, it would need to be like staff with,

we would formulate everything and then take it to sustainability. But would you like for that to be the next step and review it with them after we have a chance to work on this a little bit?

I do.

Okay. And just focus on sustainability and we'll, we'll do, let's see how we do with that. And then we'll move on to the local preferences and those things next. That's okay.

Great. Thanks.

Take it one step at a time. Great.

Good. All right. It's good when, you know, people bring up individual ideas and we're seeing evidence of it.

I will ask Karen or Matt, did you have any comments on that or feedback or additional thoughts? I asked Matt because he buys a lot of things and Karen because she implements it. All right.

That sustainability has a full agenda already. Yeah. We've

got a few things

going on.

No, that's what I'm thinking about too.

Yeah. So we'll, we'll find a,

that may not appreciate that.

We'll find a lighter meeting for that. It's never a light meeting.

Okay. Any other comments or topics from the board for today? We've covered a lot, so I thank you. And let's – oh, we need a motion to adjourn because, yes, we did the roll call. So go ahead.

Motion to adjourn.

All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. I might take just one second, though. I'm sorry to thank our chief for all of the hard work of our force over the past week or so on our homicide case. And you guys, thank you so much. I know you've been pulling all-nighters and every other thing to get this done. And, you know, the community is really grateful.

Okay. if you could weigh in on.