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REGULAR MEETING May 9, 2016 the bill are given five (5) minutes each to present their comments. Those wishing to speak against the bill have thirty (30) minutes total or as long as the people wishing to speak for the bill spoke, whichever is greater. Councilmember John Voorde, Chair of the Health and Public Safety Committee, reported that they met and due to time constraints send this bill forward with no recommendation. Councilmember Tim Scott spoke as the presenter and petitioner of the bill, Councilmember Karen White was also a co- sponsor. Councilmember Scott announced a number of city officials may serve as part of the official presentation as well. The purpose of the Landlord Registration is equitable accountability of landlords and also for tenants throughout the City. This program will even the playing field for landlords that reside here in town and also elsewhere. It will also help cut down the cost that the various departments spend when they have to search for individuals that own homes and rental properties within the City. The ordinance is narrowly crafted and in consistence with the Indiana State Law. For example, the registration fee is five (5) dollars and that is set by state law. Even the title of "landlord" used in the bill is set forth in State Code and that's why that term is used. Councilmember Scott informed the Council that they looked at best practices throughout the state including looking at the landlord registrations of Evansville, Indianapolis, Bloomington as well as Elkhart and Goshen. The registration fee of five (5) dollars will be used for the administration of the program. All fines that come from the program would go to allocation for City sidewalks as they thought anything that was generated by businesses within the neighborhood should go back into the infrastructure of the neighborhood. Also, for transparency which was asked for by the residents, a limited database will be available to the public where a name will be given to each address. The goal of the program is to have an accurate database of who is doing business within our city and to expedite any issues that come up so our departments can do their job. The five (5) dollar registration fee is for all properties per filing. There will be an online registration session which will not allow you to close the program and log out until all data is entered. If the person does not have access to the internet, they can come to Code Enforcement and they will assist you with inputting the information. The 2016 registration period will be open from September 15th to December 30th. This gives plenty of time for people to get notice and register. One change they made after committee was making the reregistration period be every September. The online registration and payment will make it possible for people out of state to register their properties. If the property is sold, the registration is the responsibility of the new owner within thirty (30) days to reregister the property in their name and again it only costs five (5) dollars. The penalties have been reduced to three- hundred (300) dollars except for an incomplete registration which was dropped to a one - hundred dollar fee as opposed to previous versions where everything was five- hundred (500) dollars. Submitting false or misrepresenting information is still five- hundred dollars which used to be one thousand (1000) dollars. A letter will be sent out if someone is not in compliance to warn the person they have thirty (30) days to get themselves registered. This gives an extra thirty (30) days before any fines are given. If you are a reregister, a postcard and email will go out as well. The fines were determined by looking at all the other cities within the state. Some cities are harsher than us, such as Evansville which fines the landlords one - hundred dollars each day that the landlord does not comply. These fines are in the range where they need to be taken seriously by landlords but are not that big of a burden. The key to the performance measures is comparing the number of hours currently incurred to locate owners before and after the passage of the bill. We want to see if this is actually working and if we are spending less than the current $200 to a $1000 a day in different departments trying to hunt these people down and spending all that time on research. If this is done correctly we should see time and money savings. Councilmember Scott committed to doing a report collated with the collaboration of the Health and Public Safety Chairperson and with public meetings and 4