WRITTEN BY JIM PHILLIPS
THURSDAY, 03 JUNE 2010 07:05
The 4th District Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of two Athens landlords in a dispute over the city’s mandatory landlord-tenant information form.
The decision overturns the low-level criminal convictions of landlords David Sturbois and Penelope Plesset for not completing and filing the forms, and remands their cases back to Athens County Municipal Court.
The ruling will probably not, however, mean that the city has to repeal, or change how it enforces, the ordinance the landlords were found guilty of violating. The two had knowingly failed to comply with the law’s requirements, in order to challenge it in court.
“By my reading of it, this opinion will not affect our ability to enforce the ordinance this year,†Athens Law Director Pat Lang said Tuesday.
Attorney Adam J. Baker, who represents Sturbois and Plesset, said he will have to confer with his clients before proceeding with the case, to see if they want to continue to try to get the law overturned.
In a ruling issued Friday, the appellate court reversed the 2009 convictions of Plesset and Sturbois on minor misdemeanors, for failing to have their tenants fill out city-required tenant-education forms and turn them in to the city.
The forms, which must be signed by both the landlord and the tenants, include information on such topics as city trash collection, maximum occupancy limits for rental homes, and city littering laws.
In February 2009, Athens County Municipal Judge William A. Grim found that the law was constitutional, but the city’s approach to enforcing it was not. Grim ruled that the city was violating equal-protection requirements by enforcing the ordinance against smaller landlords but not against the city’s biggest apartment complexes.
Rather than dismissing the cases against Plesset and Sturbois, however, Grim put the city on notice that its enforcement methods were illegal, and gave city officials time to change them.
The appellate court found that Grim shouldn’t have done this. Instead, it ruled, the judge should have thrown out the convictions of Plesset and Sturbois as soon as he decided that the ordinance was being enforced in such a way as to deny the landlords equal protection under law.
“(Sturbois and Plesset) argue that after finding that the city of Athens acted unconstitutionally, the trial court should have dismissed the charges, rather than permitting Athens time to ‘cure’ the illegal action. We agree,†stated Judge William H. Harsha, writing for the unanimous three-judge panel. “The existence of an equal-protection violation merits but one result here: dismissal of the charges against (the landlords). The court-ordered remedial actions had no effect on the underlying application of the ordinance.â€
Harsha added that Plesset and Sturbois had also raised a number of other constitutional issues about the ordinance, but that the appellate court was ignoring them, because its decision to overturn their conviction based on the equal-protection issue “renders these arguments moot.â€
Athens City Council adopted the law requiring the forms in 2005, but didn’t seriously enforce it for the first few years it was on the books. After Lang was elected law director in November 2007, however, he announced that he planned to start enforcing it – though he warned City Council that this would result in hundreds of citations for non-compliant landlords.
A number of landlords besides Plesset and Sturbois had expressed opposition to the law, suggesting that, among other problems, it forced them to violate tenants’ privacy rights.
In early November 2008, the city filed criminal charges against 40 landlords with around 200 non-compliant properties. Sturbois and Plesset were among those cited, and they chose to fight the law. (A third defendant, Judith Edinger, died unexpectedly during the course of the legal dispute.) They pled no contest to the charges against them, then filed an appeal.
Their penalties – which Grim put in abeyance during their appeal – were a $50 fine, with all but $10 suspended for each violation. This meant a fine of $190 for Sturbois and $20 for Plesset.
Both landlords were cited again for non-compliance this year – though city officials report that since Lang began his crackdown, compliance is way up.
In a case currently pending in Athens County Municipal Court, Plesset, and Sturbois’ company, JDS Enterprises, recently filed a motion asking Grim to dismiss the latest charges against them, because of the then-still-unresolved appeal in their 2009 case.
In the motion, filed May 3, attorney Adam Baker pointed out that Grim has already agreed to stay imposition of the fines against Plesset and Sturbois from the 2009 cases, while their appeal is pending.
Dismissing this year’s cases against the two, Baker maintained, is equivalent to granting this stay, as “both sets of cases are subject to the current, pending appeal.â€
Grim denied that motion Tuesday, according to Baker, and in any case, the appellate court ruling renders the issue moot.
If Plesset and Sturbois do want to continue to challenge the landlord-tenant law in court, they might be able to raise the constitutional issues that were ignored by the appellate court, which include privacy rights, due process, and an alleged conflict with a state law that limits government collection of personal information.
Baker said raising these issues anew is one possible approach. “There’s that potential, yes,†he said. Grim, however, has already rejected arguments along these lines in his ruling on the two landlords’ earlier charges.
The attorney said that at the very least, the appeals court decision gets rid of the original criminal charges against his clients, “so there is some good to it, and we may leverage that for other means, too.â€
Court overturns landlords’ convictions for not filing tenant
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Re: Court overturns landlords’ convictions for not filing te
Post by Burg_Grad_77 »
Pretty drastic measures filing a tenant. I bet that would hurt.
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