Today's Friday, October 3rd.

We're on the calendar from 115 to 215.

It's now one sixteen p.m.

We're here to discuss AO 2025-93 and 93S ordinance of the Anchorage Municipal Assembly amending anchor municipal code chapter 1505 and 1510 to require residential rental property owners provide tenants financial relocation assistance following issuance of notice to vacate and amending title eight to enact a new section 8.30.200 to make a failure to comply with an enforcement order or notice to vacate punishable as misdemeanor offenses.

So we'll start with introductions.

George Martinez.

Aaron Baldwin Day.

Zach Johnson, Jared Gerker.

Anna Brawley, Christopher Constant, Daniel Bulland.

Yeah, Silvers.

Do we have anyone on the phone?

No one.

Okay, thanks.

We're also joined by our code enforcement team and Quincy Arms from the Department of Law, our municipal attorney's office, and a couple more attorneys in the audience.

Um I want to start by asking you, Miss Silvers, do you have the amendments?

Has that been incorporated anywhere?

Or should we ask the attorneys to print those amendments?

So those are going to also be the it is in there.

Okay.

Thanks.

Never mind me, momentary answers my question.

So I don't know who called for this work session specifically.

Um, but we recognize at the meeting on Tuesday that we bogged down into deep sausage making because of it.

So um who would like to take the floor to start the conversation?

Mr.

Johnson.

Yeah, thank you.

I'll I'll keep it brief.

I think we already mentioned Tuesday the intent of this, and really it's meant to be a narrowly tailored solution that's trying to accomplish two things.

One to ensure accountability for bad actor landlords, um, and hopefully by having more consequences, encourage them to do better up front.

And then also in these exceptional circumstances to make sure that is not the tenants who are punished.

So again, our vision for this is to um for it to be a piece of code that it is is not heavily utilized, but is there when we need it.

And I think probably would be most useful in sort of explaining for people what the current process looks like today, so that we have a better understanding of how we get to the point where a structure is determined to be um that it needs to be vacated, and then maybe uh if code enforcement could talk a little bit about what would be different if this is adopted.

And if you just yeah, introduce yourself for the record and um maybe give us a quick overview.

Um, Scott Campbell, I'm the chief of inspections and supervisor, the code enforcement staff that we have for the municipality of Anchorage.

And I think we developed the SAO um for uh several properties across town that we've um had to deal with in the past several years where um we deal almost specifically with the minimum thermal heat standards for Title 15.

So one of the essential things we need in our buildings is heat, especially living in Alaska.

I don't think there's any argument there.

Um, and code says in 15.10.110 the minimum thermal heat standards and the time you can spend in that residence without heat, and then it specifically states that the landlord shall provide rental locate or rental assistance for those people if they cannot provide the heat.

Um, that's where we run into the crux of the problem.

So we can enforce this code, but if we go to a landlord and say you have to move these people, what if they say no?

We have no further enforcement at that point.

We're stuck.

We can go through all these steps, but they're gonna keep continuing to say no by allowing to have this relocation assistance, it allows us to follow through with the code requirements and allows us to actually move these people and get them into a healthy location temporarily and force that landlord who's negligent to provide some sort of resources for these individuals.

So that's the intent of this code, and we've developed this through Luke specifically, Lucas Cleek from Code Abitman's run into this several times in the last several years, and it's very difficult to um deal with these property owners because they're well funded.

A lot of the times they're corporations, and it's it's just difficult to get them to provide any assistance to their landlords when they've obviously failed to neglect the building.

Two questions.

Roughly how often in typical year would you encounter the sort of circumstance where where you might get to the point where you consider issuing a notice to vacate?

Uh it's very seldom.

Um, the majority of our notice to vacates are for legal occupying, and that's typically because somebody is broken into the residence.

They're not the tenant, they're not the landlord.

They're illegally there, or they're in a location without heat, hot water, um, gas.

That's a mandatory.

So almost majority of our of our notice to vacates are for illegal occupancy.

And most of the time, vagrants have broken in.

In fact, the I shared this with the CEDC yesterday.

We're seeing quite often people using uh battery operated chainsaws and sawzalls to cut holes in the wall cavities.

They enter through the building, not through the door through the side of the building.

They'll cut a hole in the floorboards and use it to defecate into the crawl space.

And eventually within a matter of months, if we don't find these places quick enough, we don't get aboard it up quick enough, they eventually become so dilapidated that the building becomes beyond the point of economic feasibility to repair.