http://www.twincities.com/stpaul/ci_20410240/u-s-house-committee-seeking-details-over-st
With apologies to the Steve Miller Band for the title …
This past week we received a notice of a $52.05 “fee” being assessed for “improper care of a discarded electronic device” at one of our properties. Wow! They revert to five dollar words to say you put a radio in the garbage can.
Upon review it seems our tenant put a radio/CD player in the green garbage cart. Either a scavenger or DPW took it out of the cart and left it in the alley.
As I drove around the Southside this weekend I noticed a bunch of small electronics laying next to garbage carts with little orange stickers. So despite the bill saying the property was posted, it appears the only posting were these stickers that mostly face away from the house. To make it worse the property owner does not get notice by mail until the fee is assessed.
This must be one helluva profit center for the city.
I really wish city officials were there to hear the tenant’s reaction to having this charge passed on to them.
Milwaukee Code:
79-2-13-b. No person may place an electronic device in mixed municipal solid waste or discard or otherwise dispose of an electronic device except by delivery to an electronic device collection or recycling facility.
State law that defines what an electronic device that is prohibited from being placed in the garbage:
1. A peripheral, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (j).3. A facsimile machine.4. A digital video disc player.5. A digital video player that does not use a disc and that is not a camera, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (a).6. A video cassette recorder.7. A video recorder that does not use a cassette and that is not a camera, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (a).8. A covered electronic device, as defined in s. 287.17 (1) (f).9. A telephone with a video display.10. Another kind of electronic device identified by the department under s. 287.17 (10) (i).
The Wall Street Journal Reports on the dismissal of Manger v. Gallagher:
How far will the Obama Administration go to impose racial lending quotas for banks? Far enough to lean on St. Paul, Minnesota to deny the Supreme Court the chance to rule on whether the government’s actions are legal.
The city of St Paul withdrew their petition to have the US Supreme Court intervene and stop the case over their alleged discriminatory housing code enforcement. This, less than three weeks before the Court was to hear oral arguments.
From an article in the St Paul Star Tribune:
[The plaintiff-landlord] did not respond to requests for comment, but his lawyers have argued in court that he and other inner-city landlords were targeted for aggressive code enforcement primarily because they rent to low-income and minority tenants in aging neighborhoods that some would rather see gentrified. His lead attorney, John Shoemaker, said the effect of the city crackdown was to shut down properties, increase costs and limit the supply of affordable housing in the Twin Cities.
After reading the amici briefs it was clear that St Paul could not be allowed to win at the Supreme Court. To have won would have undone 40 years of Fair Housing and Equal Rights legislation and court cases. I’m pretty sure someone smarter than St Paul’s current legal staff sat them down and explained all of this to them.
St. Paul now boasts that “it will be successful in defending its code enforcement actions in any court”
Hmm, if that is so then why did St Paul try so hard to avoid trial by going to the US Supreme Court after a Court of Appeals decision to let the case go forward? Remember that this case is in its eight or ninth year and has already had a major impact on St Paul’s budget.
Ironically St Paul is now having listening sessions with landlords to try and work out arrears of contention. Perhaps they should have taken this approach a decade ago.
I predict a settlement is imminent.
Hats off to Frank and the others for having the fortitude to stay the course for all these years.
If you have been a reader for a while you are aware of the St Paul landlords’ case against their city’s code enforcement department. The case is now at the US Supreme Court. Here are a few updates and articles:
The following article is from RoofLines
At issue in the case, Magner v. Gallagher, is whether the Fair Housing Act prohibits the full range of discrimination in housing that many Americans still face in the 21st Century.
The case comes out of St. Paul, Minnesota, where a group of landlords who rent affordable homes to racially diverse tenants say the city is driving them and their tenants out of town in favor of less affordable and less diverse owner-occupied housing. The Supreme Court took the case to decide, not whether these facts are true but, rather, assuming they are true, whether the city’s alleged conduct violates the Fair Housing Act absent proof that the city purposefully intended to exclude people of color from its borders.
The Supreme Court Briefs and commentary are posted on Ademocracy
II. Factual Background
…..
This case arises from the City’s adoption of a policy to nonetheless limit its stock of private low-income housing, including by forcing respondents to abandon or sell the housing they provided, in favor of owner-occupied housing. The City pursued that specific policy through the selective and often illegal application of its housing code in a manner designed to produce the closure or abandonment of private low-income rental properties either directly, through condemnation, or indirectly, by rendering the maintenance of the properties uneconomical.
The City’s actions included targeting respondents’ properties for “code to the max” and “forced sale” treatment, falsely labeling those properties as “problem” and “distressed” housing, charging those properties with false code violations, failing to provide respondents with timely notice of claimed code violations, and condemning the properties without a sufficient basis.
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