By Wes Wellman, ACTION President
I am honored to return as president of ACTION. I was previously President of ACTION in 1988 and 1989. ACTION will surely miss Gordon Gitlen and I will personally miss him as well. He was a tenacious leader who was always working to protect your property rights.
Whenever there is a change in leadership for an organization it is a time for reflection about where ACTION has been and where it is going. When I first got involved with ACTION in 1984 I found a young organization with members of great creativity, open hostility for rent control and a desire to protect property rights. Over the years we have had the opportunity to try many plans of attack on Rent Control. Some of which have worked and many have failed.
These attacks have included two initiatives for vacancy decontrol, one in the 80’s and one in the 90’s. In the 80’s, we were successful at getting a condominium conversion ordinance passed called TORCA (Tenant Ownership Rights Charter Amendment). We lost on the first attempt at the polls but we were close enough that SMRR leadership decided to negotiate a deal rather than have us pass TORCA on our own. Unfortunately, it had a sunset provision which occurred during the Real Estate downturn of the mid 90’s. Therefore, it died for lack of interest.
We recently attempted a condo conversion ordinance but it failed at the polls because a majority of the owners were more interested in staying in business than selling their units as condos. This is a testament to the success of the Costa-Hawkins vacancy decontrol bill that passed through the California Legislature in 1995, just 10 years ago. The passage of the Costa-Hawkins bill has brought a more amicable era with the Rent Control Board.
Our opponents too were young and dumb and made many mistakes that we were able to exploit. However, they too have grown, matured, calmed down and have set about the business of protecting their political power base. They are willing to even “eat their own young” when politics have required it. This occurred in the early 90’s when SMRR fired their City Attorney, Robert Myers, when he would not tow the political line in trying to crack down on the homeless problem which was by all accounts worse than it is today. Yes, it is hard to believe, it was worse! But Robert Myers would not prosecute even the most hardened criminal element of the homeless. ACTION made an attempt to create an elected City Attorney position. The measure failed. However, we were successful at pinning a badge on Robert Myers as the promoter of the homeless. When SMRR did a survey they discovered that most of the people in Santa Monica equated the homeless problem with Robert Myers. As such, SMRR majority fired their own to protect their voter base at the polls.
Another example of how SMRR has grown up is in the 3304 regulations, which allow owners to evict a tenant who is not using their unit as their primary residence. The Rent Control Board was informed that they could not protect against such a law on a state level unless they passed one themselves. Thus, the Rent Control Board passed the ordinance in order to control the process. Their process of course makes it much more difficult for landlords to evict tenants not in residency. However, units have been recovered using the process.
Over the years we have used the court system many a time in an attempt to protect property rights. We once won a unanimous appellate decision in the Santa Monica Beach case which held Rent Control unconstitutional. However, the California and the U.S. Supreme Courts saw the property rights issue differently and reserved the decision. To make matters worse we have had several recent cases that have negatively impacted property rights. In Lingle v. Chevron U.S. Supreme Court allowed the State of Hawaii to regulate rents on gas stations. Then, in Kelo v. New London the Supreme Court allowed the government to take property for public use provided it paid just compensation. However, an elderly woman’s home was being taken and then given to a private developer for their corporate headquarters. The ink is hardly dry on the decision and the City of Santa Monica has already announced that it wants to seize an apartment building and demolish it for code violations.
ACTION recently won Balter v. SMRCB, which prevents the RCB from forcing us to pay interest on Security deposits. Our attorney Rosario Perry obtained an attorneys fee award of $175,000.
With the new court rulings we must concentrate on smaller cases of general appeal. We should also focus on changing state laws in Sacramento.
Please feel free to call me or the ACTION office with your own short story of what the rent board is doing to you so that we can help to protect your property rights. We are looking for cases to file which would protect property rights in general and that are not totally unique to your situation.
I look forward to serving as your new President of ACTION and I look forward to hearing from you. I also encourage and ask you to jump in and participate more with ACTION. We can become stronger and more effective by having more involvement from our members. I look forward to your participation.
