Proposed changes to Sikeston's rental inspection code are now before the city council, and they're long overdue. The new changes, City Planner and Code Enforcement Manager Lorenzo Ware says, would be the first to take place since the 1990s.
Some of the changes in the revised rental ordinance would relax inspection requirements on rental properties. The current municipal code requires inspections on the nearly 3,000 rental structures in Sikeston every two years, which proved to be quite a stretch for the enforcement division’s six staff members.
If approved, these changes would push examinations back to every five years. But, there are other things enforcement staff will be looking at when surveying properties, especially regarding safety requirements.
“I added the nomenclature to let everyone know that as we did these inspections, we’re looking out, number one, for the health, safety, and welfare of the individual renter,” Ware says. “That’s something that’s added on top of the typical housing inspection standards.”
As the code enforcement authority in Sikeston, Ware says he worked hard to communicate to landlords on Monday that they would be going beyond the basics and keep an eye out for a variety of health issues.
The changes have received fairly positive feedback, he says, and a recent meeting with landlords “went over quite well.”
Despite increasing the time between inspections, the new code does state the department will respond immediately to any formal complaints about different properties.
“We kind of did some changing to make the goal more achievable - the goals for the department,” he says. “And to make the process less cumbersome for the landlords themselves, while still protecting the citizenship of Sikeston.”
While there was an “extensive effort made” following a revamp of the division to effectively use the current code, Ware says they decided things need to change.
“You don’t know what needs to be fixed until you find out it’s broken. So it took a total of three months until we found out the old process was kind of broken,” says Ware.
The ordinance for these changes will have its first reading at the council’s July 29 meeting.
A few things were cut out in the ordinance, including tenancy fees which charged a $15 inspection fee each time a renter moved onto a property. Ware says this cost landlords a lot of money whenever residents moved in and out multiple times a year.
There’s also a difference in how inspections are done, he says, and now internal and external inspections are lumped together, limiting the number of times a building may be examined. Another process that’s been eliminated is keeping the Board of Municipal Utilities from turning power on at a property until they received a certificate stating that the building was occupied.
At a time when a number of local communities are changing their rental laws, Ware says he sees a national change: younger people are renting much more than past generations.
“There is a change in the trend, but the change is also nationwide,” he says. “We’re becoming more of a nation of renters instead of owners, and it’s typically because of the age difference in the population.”
According to the 2010 Census, Sikeston was ground to nearly 7,800 homes, of which 40% were rental property. Ware says this uptick has been growing for nearly a decade.
“All the local cities are being brought into this new game, and one is now formulating a game-plan,” he said.