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REGULAR MEETING May 9, 2016 Samuel Brown, 222 East Navarre Street South Bend, expressed his support for Bill 12 -16. He stated he is on the Human Rights Commission and Lonnie Douglas is the Executive Director and Glenda Rae is the Chairperson and is the Chair at the meetings. Only Mr. Douglas can speak for the Human Rights Commission and he answers to the Mayor. He stated because of the ambiguity the Council should leave the Human Rights Commission out of consideration. Mr. Brown, speaking on behalf of Citizens United, stated the City of South Bend should have this ordinance so that these absentee landlords can be contacted when it is necessary. A lot of these companies are LLCs that do not do their jobs and they have no idea about what is going on in these homes. Randy Wilkerson, Director of Code Enforcement, is willing to work with people and he has worked very well with Mr. Brown. This ordinance needs to be in place because this is a very serious issue which is obvious by the Police and Fire Chiefs coming here and speaking today. Regarding the fines, you need to have a balance of where the average citizen can pay them but also where it would be a financial burden to an LLC. There are many of these absentee landlords who do not live here but their letters go to a P.O. Box in South Bend. This bill would help get a real address for these landlords. Rebecca Kaiser, 913 Diamond Avenue South Bend, spoke in favor of the bill. For the last few months we keep hearing about the "poor people" of South Bend, but these statements are never made by somebody who lives in a poor neighborhood. It is usually stated by some academic who is discussing the poor in South Bend. Ms. Kaiser asked the Council to stop making both her and her neighbors victims. The landlords are victimizing the poor of this city enough. We can use MACOG to find out where a landlord has an address but when we do find that address we find things like "trust of 913 Diamond" goes to 913 Diamond. If we have a problem with these landlords and who they are renting their houses to, certainly we cannot get ahold of them. The poor people in South Bend, who are the victims in this situation, have to suffer through trying to make the neighborhoods better through a complaint driven system. That is something a lot of people don't understand, we are not going to target landlords who do the right thing. We are going to be able to contact the landlords who hide behind the LLC and put their property in trust and who are making our neighborhoods deteriorate. Many of her neighbors are low income but they still keep their yards up and keep their houses respectable, if we don't have the tools to contact a landlord who has a problem then we have no tools to help keep our neighborhoods decent. Ms. Kaiser informed the Council she goes to the Code Enforcement hearings and there are property management companies who own these properties who say that the neighborhood is trash so they rent to trash. The people who live in these neighborhoods are not trash, they are hardworking resourceful people who make South Bend a great place to live. There is a difference between poor people who are responsible and criminals. Right now, even though there are good landlords, some of what we are letting landlords do is criminal. There are houses in this city where we would not even let a dog or cat live in and you are making poor people live there because there are no other options because Code Enforcement cannot get into these houses. Let's stop talking about the poor and making them victims to these landlords. Noreen Dean Moren, President of the Near North West Neighborhood Association, stated her support for the bill and for Ms. Kaiser's opinions. We are victims of people all over the world who own these properties and the landlords are not in danger of anything except losing illegally gained money by putting poor people through ridiculous situations. It is laughable to think these landlords will raise their rates because of this because no one with a higher rent would move into these homes. The landlord situation is ridiculous and them complaining about the fines is ridiculous because if they do things correctly they will not incur the fines. If the fines are reduced to a low level they will be willing to pay them instead of fixing the problems. Ms. Moren stated every problem in her neighborhood is from a rental landlord situation. The Near North West Neighborhood Association voted in February unanimously to support this bill and they have been waiting for it for years. We are desperate for this bill and will celebrate its passage. Wayne Bennick, Fredrickson South Bend IN, spoke in support of the bill. He stated the previous two (2) speakers have summed up accurately the issues they have been having with these absentee landlords. The police are wasting their valuable time and resources hunting these landlords down when we need them on the streets protecting people. Landlords are causing a lot of the issues on the Westside, they don't care who they get their money from or how they get their money. That attitude gets people hurt very seriously. We need to hold the landlords 10