By DEBRA HAIGHT
BCR Correspondent
BERRIEN SPRINGS – More than two decades after an earlier rental housing ordinance was thrown out in court, Oronoko Township officials are making another push to enact rules for local short and long term rentals.
A public information meeting on the township’s proposed new rental housing ordinance will be held at 6:30 p.m. April 30 at the township’s public safety building on Snow Road.
Oronoko Township Board members set that public meeting date at their monthly April meeting after accepting the latest draft of the ordinance. A board committee has been working on the proposed ordinance for nearly two years.
The new ordinance will be called the Rental Safety Verification Program or RSVP and will cover both long term and short term rentals. Short term rentals where places are rented out for 30 days or less at a time will be inspected annually. Long term rentals will be inspected on a bi-annual basis.
As currently proposed, the owner of a single family home will pay $100 for registration and inspection once every two years with an additional $20 for each subsequent dwelling unit. Owners of short term rentals will be assessed $300 every year for registration and inspection. Re-inspections will cost landlords $50 per re-inspection per inspector.
Dates have not been determined yet for when the new ordinance will be formally introduced and voted on. Township Clerk Suzanne Renton said the board could set a public hearing after the April 30 meeting or go back and make some revisions to the proposed ordinance.
The township board is also moving ahead with two other ordinances, one concerning parking and another concerning private roads. Those ordinances were introduced at the board’s April meeting and will be voted on at the board’s May 14 meeting.
The parking ordinance amendment addresses similar blight issues that are the focus of the rental ordinance. The focus of the parking ordinance is to address concerns such as front yards becoming parking lots around some homes that are rentals or duplexes.
The need for a new parking ordinance was brought home by comments from residents JoAnn Amorelli and Henry Seo. They said a rental home near them on Greenfield has graveled the entire front yard to accommodate as many as seven cars.
“We will lay out all the facts so people have the correct information to base their opinion on,” Township Supervisor Mike Hildebrand said. “We want people to know that it’s not the rental housing ordinance of 10 or 20 years ago.”
Issues raised by Hildebrand and other township officials in support of having a rental housing ordinance on the books include renter and firefighter safety, blight and declining property values. The township has had complaints about people living in basements without egress to the outside and in homes with failed water and septic systems.
Oronoko Township has not had a rental housing ordinance on the books for more than two decades. The issue divided the community and the township’s ordinance ended up being thrown out in court in 1997 after it came up earlier in that decade.
The most recent discussion about enacting a new ordinance began nearly two years ago when the subject came up at a public forum. Residents said then that they wanted to see public safety concerns addressed but did not want to see good landlords be punished.
The township’s previous rental housing ordinance was approved in the mid-1990s and later thrown out in Berrien County Trial Court after two landlords, John Weakley and Glenn Tinker, challenged the ordinance in court.
A subsequent effort in 2007 and 2008 to enact a new ordinance was abandoned when landlords raised objections to being singled out for enforcement and having to pay inspection and registration fees. They spoke against having more government regulation and having good landlords punished alongside those with problems.
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