ORONO, Maine — In a town with the state’s flagship university, the number of rental units and tenants would seem to be statistics the Town Council might want to know.
Orono’s council is starting to get a handle on those numbers as the town’s rental registration program moves forward. Code enforcement officer William Murphy presented the first results of the program Monday to the council.
As of Oct. 31, the town has been notified it has 1,359 total rental units housing 2,775 tenants. Those numbers were culled from registration forms sent to those who owned property in town, although there are still outstanding registrations because several property owners haven’t yet met the Nov. 21 deadline to register.
The town won’t do anything with those numbers quite yet, but eventually the statistics will be used in municipal planning.
Conlow said, for example, the council will start looking at a shuttle program that would bring students and others from certain spots in town to the University of Maine campus. Rental numbers will help the town plot out tenant hot spots to determine the location of shuttle stops.
“[The impetus for the program] was, how do we work with the situation here, make some of the units safer, better and cleaner,” Conlow said. “The other thing was … it’s odd to be in a community and try to do planning for mass transit and things like that, and not have information about where your population lives.”
Other issues that drove the registration program were problems with tenants having a screened place to put their garbage, overoccupancy in some buildings and sufficient parking spaces for tenants.
“It’s OK for a landlord to rent to five people, but you’ve got to have the parking for it, because that gets to the issue of parking on the front lawn [of a rental property],” Conlow said. “From a student perspective, what do you do? You’ve got to park your car.”
Conlow said state occupancy laws are such that if more than three nonrelated people are living in a single-family home, the home must be considered a boarding house and is therefore subject to commercial standards in terms of fire and building codes.
Earlier this year, Orono amended its definition of a family in a zoning district in which multifamily dwellings are not a permitted use to include a group of unrelated individuals not exceeding three persons occupying a single dwelling unit. Dwelling units that fall into that group as of June 18, 2007, were grandfathered with the standard that no more than five unrelated individuals are living in the dwelling.
In zones in which multifamily dwellings are permitted, a group of no more than five un-related individuals may live together.
Those changes led to the program, the process of which started this spring when 1,702 property owners were sent postcards asking if they owned rental property in Orono. The town received a yes response from 386 owners, a no response from 1,117 owners, and no response at all from 199 owners.
The property owners who answered yes were then sent a registration form for each structure they owned.
To date, the town has not received returned registration forms from several dozen property owners. The deadline to return the forms is Friday, Nov. 21, which was an extension of the original deadline of Sept. 1. There were several owners who did not respond to the initial request for information.
Rental owners must pay a registration fee of $25 per unit, which will be used to develop and maintain a database.
One snag in the process, which may skew the data a bit, has been the wording of information requests on the registration forms. The forms request the owner to list the number of unrelated tenants in each unit, which did not give the town the total number of tenants in each unit and resulted in some respondents answering zero.
The flaw is being corrected, Murphy told the council, and the form will be changed before it goes out again in January 2009.
The town has put together an action plan made up of three steps. The first, which is evaluation of the information already received, is already under way. In this step, the code enforcement officer will contact noncompliant owners to inform them of the issues and to order correction.
Owners who do not respond by Nov. 21 will be considered in violation of the ordinance and could be subject to fines of $100 per day for each rental unit they own.
The second step will be for the town to do a drive-by inspection of all rental units with an expected date of completion of Dec. 5, 2008. The inspections will start in the town’s village area. Owners of units identified as noncompliant will be contacted to inform them of the issues.
The third step will be to do a physical inspection, if necessary, of any suspect properties. Owners will be contacted in advance. If units are found to be noncompliant, the owner will be contacted.
990-8287