Housing Law Scrapped; Council to Consider New Housing Law

A week after the SLO City Council voted to repeal the controversial, Rental Housing Inspection Program or RHIP, a citizens’ petition to repeal and replace it was qualified for a special election, according to an announcement from the Assistant City Manager, Derek Johnson, citing the city clerk.
Petition proponents, Stewart Jenkins, Dan Knight and Dan Carpenter, submitted 7,112 petition signatures to qualify the initiative for a vote. It’s unknown how many of the total were collected by paid, signature gatherers; such employees explained their presence at Cal Poly and in Downtown SLO to the SLO City News during the petition drive earlier in the year.
The County Clerk- Recorder’s Office used a statistical sampling model to determine that approximately 5,419 of the signatures were valid, enough to qualify.
Since there are sufficient signatures, the City Council will consider three options at a meeting March 21. They will either: Order a report analyzing impacts of the citizens’ initiative; adopt the ordinance without alteration; or submit the ordinance in the initiative to the voters at a special election. A special election is estimated to cost $119,000 to $158,000, which might seem a waste of money for a city that just the week before claimed it was heading towards a fiscal cliff because of high employee retirement costs.
The Council unanimously repealed the RHIP on March 7 but that has no effect on the petitions. State law now requires that the City Council consider whether to adopt the initiative as is or place it before City voters. If adopted by the Council or approved by City voters in a special election, the petition would replace the RHIP with a so-called “Nondiscrimination in Housing” ordinance.
City staff have been preparing for the Council to order an analysis looking at its fiscal impacts; consistency of the ordinance with the City’s general plan and zoning ordinance; impacts on infrastructure funding; ad its impact on a mobile home rent control provision, among others.