Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Monday, July 27th.

Um mobile home park rules, rental rules, I suppose, workshop.

Um was this meeting properly noticed, town manager?

Yes, it was.

Perfect.

Um currently we have all members present, the two that are not in the room are on Zoom of Councillor Peralt and Counselor Hicks.

So without further ado, we'll go ahead and jump on in just to review the agenda.

The thing that we plan on talking about today is the rules and procedures for the mobile home park rent review board that we just established in a recent ordinance.

Um I'll also give a uh just a heads up to you all that we have another workshop next week uh at five just before our town council meeting, and that is looking at the AI data center overlay ordinance, um, which we currently have a moratorium on, and one other thing.

Uh and uh talking about some of the rated street.

The main street overlay, that was the other one.

Yeah.

Um just to give a little preview, but I know that we're doing more of these workshops, and this one's kind of on an odd day um that we don't have a meeting, but we scheduled this one before we started this whole process and we want to see it through.

So without further ado, new business, I'll bring up director of economic and community development, uh Costello to talk about the rules and good evening, counselors here and on Zoom.

Thank you for um taking the time for this extra meeting.

If you recall when you passed the um ordinance, we had that very lengthy schedule of a lot of actions and activities to get us to getting our rent board up and running and being able to um actually implement the ordinance.

So um this is one very important step.

Um it's coming off a um workshop at the housing committee that we had last Wednesday.

Um and we had a very robust process.

Um we actually enlisted the help of our three Bowdoin interns working with Fran Smith and I um as staff and then the finance subcommittee for the um housing committee.

So we had people that had relevant experience to help us kind of pull this together.

Um and they are not here tonight, but they actually presented in front of the housing committee.

They did an excellent job, I will say.

Um Ian Bridges, Omar Frostman, and Andy Robinson.

So they helped us um with the research and then just um working on the drafts, the various drafts, which of course were reviewed um and had input by our legal staff.

Um and then Andy, who is a an intern with economic development, he also helped develop an FAQ.

So that document was something that we hope um makes it easier for people to use the mobile home park ordinance in general, but also just some kind of key questions, answers that I think will help generally um with the whole process.

So with that, I'm gonna go through their their presentation just to give you guys a sense of what the process was.

Next slide, please.

So we started by um researching a number of ordinances.

We did not by any means uh just start with a blank slate.

We did not reinvent the wheel.

We looked at other um or uh uh ordinances that had you know rent um stabilization.

So Samford, Old Orchard, Portland, and Waterville.

Um and I think we took the very best parts of those or tried to.

Um and we got counseled by our legal staff about what things um you know would really help the board in their review because the purpose of the board is actually I'm gonna read this because it was in my memo, and I think it's important for the um the public to know that the purpose of the mobile home park rent review board is to impartially review any and all requests to raise rents on a mobile home park lot, which exceeds the affordability threshold as defined in Chapter 10, Article 6 of the Brunswick Town Codes.

The rules and regulations supplement the ordinance and establish uniform procedures for the administration of rent increased rent requests.

So that's important because um it's a very limited scope, um, but it's a very important um board responsibility.

So as you recall, the ordinance has two pieces to it.

It has the property piece, which we are hiring a new codes enforcement officer to work with us on addressing some of those um issues, and then the rent review board.

So rents and property.

Um so that's that's their very narrow scope.

But that being said, it's pretty broad.

And if you also recall, we have a lot of different mobile home parks, and they're we've got one publicly held, we've got privately held parks, we've got resident-owned communities, and we also have some that have not only do they um rent the lots and have you know mobile homes come to there, but they also just rent mobile homes.

So they're they're treated a little bit differently.

So there's a lot of nuances to uh think about when you're writing these rules and regulations to give the proper guidance to this new board.

So some of the takeaways that the um that the interns um really wanted to communicate to um the housing committee and to you all is that um the the the first piece was the board organization, so the logistics, the the meeting order, um the leadership and the responsibilities of the chair and vice chair, et cetera, what constitutes a quorum, those kind of things.

And then the second part really was to review the procedures for how they will like review lot rent increases.

Um so there's some criteria and a checklist and um all of these things in the decision making process are really um nuanced.

And so there's a long list, but a lot of those things were really debated by staff and legal and of course the housing committee had um looked at this as well.

And then how do we notice how does the rent notices happen?

Those are really critical.

You know, there's some state regulations around that, um, but there's also we have other regulations around that, and one of the important things that happened, uh, and before we dive into just the overall document, um the things that really um got changed were around um the noticing, right?

Because we really were concerned, or the housing committee wanted to make sure that tenant information was not included in this, was not requested.

So we have a and I'll show you later in the presentation.

We have just a spreadsheet of the information that we're going to be collecting that the rent review board that will be provided by every landlord once a year, and we will then they'll be able to check various information to see what how those uh rents are and if they've met those, if they're under the or met the affordability or they're actually coming for an increase and having to um have a hearing.

Um next slide, please.

So um they just wanted to let the the committee know what their process was.

So of course they they met with a Fran and I.

Fran was really helpful because she does a lot of implementation of a lot of the ordinances and she's very good on order of meetings and all that.