Apartment fees may increase
By Kevin Kelley
Fairview Park
Published Oct. 22, 2008

City Council is considering increases in the annual license fees paid by owners of apartment complexes.

The current fee is $75 per apartment complex, plus an additional five dollars for the first 100 individual units, then three dollars for each unit thereafter.

Although no legislation has yet been presented before council, members appeared to be leaning toward raising the per-unit fee to $75. The base fee per apartment complex would remain at $75, council members said during discussions at an Oct. 13 committee meeting.

The purpose of raising the license fee is to generate income so the city can hire additional personnel in its building department. An additional building inspector would mean the city could conduct more inspections, which would improve the quality of the city’s apartment buildings, city officials said.

The long-term benefit of such a plan would be a higher dollar value of the city’s apartment properties that would result from capital improvements encouraged by a more vigorous inspection program, Development Director Jim Kennedy said.

City Council President Jamie Robatin said at the committee meeting that the city’s apartment stock has not been at the level the city would like it to be at.

But Dan Miclau, general manager of 200 West Apartments, located at 20201 Lorain Road, expressed shock at the talk of an increased license fee.

“That’s a horribly tremendous increase,” Miclau said of a possible increase of $5 to $75 in the per-unit part of the fee.

“We’d have to look at increased rent for tenants,” he told West Life. Or the apartment complex would have to take money from other areas of its budget, such as maintenance, to pay for the fee, he said.

Miclau said 200 West has never had a problem with apartment inspections. It’s unfair to make all apartment buildings pay a higher fee just because some apartment owners don’t keep up their properties, he added.

The proposed changes to the city’s code regulating apartment buildings will be sent to city Law Director Sara Fagnilli for review before any legislation is introduced before council.

In a related program under an existing law, owners of the city’s 39 apartment buildings were sent a letter by the city earlier this month telling them to submit a list of all occupants of rental units to the city’s finance department. Information from those lists will be used to cross check tax information from R.I.T.A to make sure city income tax is being paid by all residents, Mayor Eileen Patton said.

A proposed ordinance establishing an annual license fee of $100 for owners of single and double-family homes and condominiums that are rented out had its second reading before council Monday night. That ordinance is scheduled to be up for a vote at council’s Nov. 3 meeting. The city is in the process of creating a database of rental dwelling properties in an effort to better maintain the community’s housing stock.

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