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The Athens City Council held committee meetings on Monday, October 26, 2026, covering updates from the Rental Code Inspection Process Subcommittee, a solid waste contract extension, a resolution on political campaigns, non-union pay and benefits, staffing, health insurance, the 2027 budget, a new neighborhood corridor overlay zone, and liquor permit requests. All items were moved to full council for future action.
Good morning and welcome to Athens City Council. Oh good evening. It is Monday, October 26th, and we're in committees this evening, beginning with the committee of the whole, and a wonderful update from our rental code inspection process subcommittee. And we have our former council members, Silvaeus Bilnez here to kick us off. I will turn things over to you for your 15-minute presentation. Thank you very much. And um I'm going to try to make this brief. I see that you have a lot of things on the agenda, and Debbie Walker, our wonderful clerk had kind of cautioned me that you guys are too busy to have too long a discussion by me. So I'm going to try to make this brief. Anyway, uh for those of you who don't know me, I'm Sylvie Spielness, and um I was a researcher, program evaluator, and associate professor in the Department of Social Work, and I taught policy, particularly in and including housing policy, so this issue is very important to me. I was on City Council as mentioned, and I am chairing this subcommittee. So let me get started. What I'm going to do today is give you an overview of where we're at now. It is not an appropriate place to discuss results because things are too preliminary. Uh if you kind of get little nuggets and pieces, it could be misinterpreted, and we want to put it all together before we uh give you something substantive. So uh just to refer to the resolution to remind you, uh it's a resolution in support of establishing an ad hoc one here affordable housing commission subcommittee under the uh neighborhood revitalization committee to review rental code inspection processes to enhance efficient and effective code compliance and rental unit safety. And just to give you uh an understanding of what we're trying to do here, we're trying to create a model safe rental community that works well for the code office, renters, the university, landlords, and for the overall economic health and well-being of all Athenians. Okay, I want to start off by saying how much we appreciate Tom Pyle's cooperation and some of the things that he has done to make some changes. He has been revising the inspection reports, making them much easier, more transparent, and better to interpret and analyze. Great. He's also changing some other systems, and he hired a fourth code officer. Thank you very much. We needed that. I also want to emphasize that as part of this process, uh we are continuing to speak with him about what's going on and what his thoughts are. We are concerned about making sure that anything we do propose is vetted by him so that we don't have some hare-brained ideas coming through without them being viable and reasonable and fundable. Okay, so just to give you a sense of where we're at, these are our other RIPS members. The appointed members are Matt Hall, our city representative, our captain of uh the fire department, Jim Kaufman, Ohio University representative, and Alan Swink here as our City Council representative, our elected members, Rick Wasserman, who represents landlords, Katie Bushel, our recent one that you approved, is our tenant representative, and uh Caitlin McDaniel is our renter advocate. Uh Jennifer Woody Collins is our researcher program evaluator. So we have a great, really stellar team to work on this. Thank you. So I thought it would be relevant to discuss all the other folks that are involved with this. We have literally dozens of people who have stepped up as a volunteer or someone interested, or that we reached out to and were interested in talking to us. So uh we talked to, for example, the Athens Public Health Department, they inspect houses. Uh we talked to the Athens Municipal Housing Authority, we talked to HAPCAP, we talked to legal aid, we talked to local historians and landlords, uh attorneys off-campus housing, and we're gonna be talking more to them. The Ohio Student Senate and the Ohio Student Senate uh president has come to our meetings, and he has established uh right from the get-go, an Ohio Student Renters Association. And they are coordinating with us, and notably Katie, our new member, is uh the board chair of that new committee. So she's our liaison with that, which is absolutely wonderful. We're talking to other cities code offices, professionals, and IT and AI professionals, along with just interested folks who want to talk with us. Okay, housing context. So I'm gonna give you some of the things that we are looking at. Uh we're reviewing housing crisis issues, the lack of housing, particularly rentals, the affordability and housing statistics, the fact that we don't have enough, etc. We're looking at the history of housing, particularly here in Athens, demographics and our growth and possibilities. We are looking at legal issues, of course, federal law, Ohio Revised Code, Local Ordances, and relevant case law. We also are looking at potential area rental housing. Is there what can we do at the ridges? As you know, there's going to be some somewhere in the neighborhood of 720 to 750 housing units. Of course, those won't won't be rentals, but it will add housing and potentially open up some rentals for people who move from rentals into regular housing. Then low-income tax credit housing. We have some that are opening up, as you know, in the plains and just outside the city, and potentially in the ridges as well.