The Lewiston City Council held a workshop followed by a regular meeting on July 7, 2026. The workshop focused on the city's rental registration program, exploring expansion and data collection. The regular meeting included public comments on public safety and the syringe service petition, a consent agenda, several public hearings and ordinance passages, a vote to postpone a major development letter of intent, and a discussion on event permits for social service programming. The meeting concluded with council debate over funding an economic development director position.
Council President. Um, right now, but if there was several communities that run rental registration programs also attach uh a fee uh to the rental registration in order to help fund code enforcement to be more proactive so that people are actually living in we know that there's a challenge with affordable housing, obviously. There's also a challenge with safe housing. Uh and that's that's clear in our community. And so, like, how do we look at the ways we're collecting data in order to decide in the future whether or not we are going to um take proactive steps as opposed to being reactive in the city. I would also say too that all of the land banking models that currently operate in the state run on uh a rental registry. Um, so land banking is a model in which we encourage development uh on underutilized properties and address uh blight in our community. Um, it's also um for instance, right now we have no idea how many vacant properties we have in the community, and we also don't know what we can do in order to encourage people. I think about models where, for instance, we get a lead grant, right? Um, and we don't necessarily know how many homes out there that are being rented that need a lead lead of bait, and it's a it's a it's a process in which people come to us. And so these are data points that we can collect. Um if we ever decided to say, hey, we have a grant out there that we want to apply to a particular type of housing or in order to encourage a particular type of type type of housing. If we don't have that database to work from, um we just don't know what's uh who we're reaching out to, right? Like targeted to targeted action in order to both incentivize an investment and then again uh to address both blight um and uh and uh unsafe living conditions. Uh I think those are those are points in this. Currently, our system does not permit us to collect uh the types of information that that I'm suggesting that we would get. Um, and so um I don't know if uh possibly we could have uh um both. I'm gonna ask for for you for you to give some feedback and then I'll uh also uh director Connor. Sure. So um and I'll apologize to Councilor Najene. He reached out at the end of May and asked if we could sit down and meet, and I said no, because we had the election coming up, and then we just we had a situation in my office that you're aware of. So I said I just don't have the time now, so I do apologize, Councilor Natine. I wasn't able to sit down with you ahead of time to answer your questions. On the rental registration application, we do ask questions about lead abatement. So we do have that data and that information. Just to back up and give you a little bit of background. In 2017, the city had an ad hoc committee to review the possible establishment of a rental registration program and other housing issues in the city. One of their recommendations was to establish a rental registration program. What they recommended in the report and what the city council at the time adopted in an ordinance is not the same. It's sort of a uh a watered down version, if you will, of what the ad hoc committee had recommended, but we did create one of the first rental registration programs in the state for long-term rentals, not short-term rentals for Airbnbs, but long-term year-round rentals. So that ordinance was established in 2019, and as part of our questions, we do ask questions such as sprinkler system led abatement, but the purpose of it was to capture information because it was created as a result of all the fires that were happening downtown several years prior to that, when the city realized several apartment buildings are owned by out of state landlords. We don't have a local contact for a local property manager, and a lot of the buildings were owned by an LLC, which was owned by another LLC, which was owned by another LLC, some of them five deep, so we really had to drill down to find out who the owner was. So that was another one of the reasons really a public safety matter for the fire department and others to know who actually owns the building and who a local contact is. You know, to be able to enforce um the paperwork filing. So we have a pretty good rate. I would say over 95% participation rate, which is really um really good for this program, but we did a while ago check around to uh various towns and several other communities do it the same way we do, no fee, um, and just basically information gathering, but then others, like you said, counselor and agene do charge a fee. For example, Sanford, it's on a sliding scale, but it's like $300 for every three unit and up properties. Orno charges $25 per unit. So they're kind of all over the place. Um, a lot of the towns that just do it for information gathering only, it's actually administered by their fire department because the fire department needs this contact information to be able to go in and do safety inspections, so they want the landlord contact information. Um but so some of those data points you said we we are collecting, but it is for three units and over. So I know that you had said, is it possible to add uh single family homes? I don't know how we would determine what single family homes are for rent within the city unless we're constantly scouring the classifieds and online. I don't know how we would determine that information. We can certainly get information from the assessing department regarding how many duplexes we have in the city because those are not included yet because it's three or more. Um I know you brought up some other categories as well. The ordinance specifically excludes dormitories and nursing homes, and I can't remember sort of the other categories. It's really just your traditional apartment building that would be participating in this program. Okay, that makes sense. Out of curiosity, how accessible is that information to like let's say the public, for instance, if they wanted to determine anyone can submit a FOA request and we would provide that information to them.