Month: December 2018

What Happened at the December 18, 2018, MH Coalition Meeting?

This meeting was held in Salem with John VanLandingham facilitating.

Information Sharing:

  • The Speaker of the House will reintroduce a bill (former HB 2004) which didn’t pass in 2017 regarding requiring for-cause evictions which will affect apartments, RVs and marinas. It is my understanding that this will only affect marina tenants who are not already covered under the second half of chapter 90 (in other words, not us), but not enough is known about this. In summary, whatever is introduce will likely favor tenants.
  • Update on our draft bill language: Legislative Counsel is in the process of drafting. It has been a slow process. We have a relatively new LC assigned to us. The draft isn’t ready to be shared with this group yet.
  • Bill Process: We will schedule our bill to be introduced, then we will have to amend it to include the remaining parts that we are still debating, then it will be voted on.
  • We have already agreed to Park Closure Sunset extensions for capital gains benefit (Income from sale of park is exempt from taxes).
  • Representative Marsh is looking to introduce a few bills which may affect parks. One topic is about asbestos.
  • Senator Propanski and Representative Nathanson are still working through the workgroup issues for LC 1334 mentioned at last meeting. They will likely introduce LC 1334 as is and then have a workgroup meeting during the legislative session to finalize it before passing it.
  • Representative Boone is interested in scheduling a study group about manufactured housing finance and zoning issues.

DISPUTE RESOLUTION ISSUE:

John reached out to Robert, a CDRC practitioner and mediator, and asked him to provide input on our Dispute Resolution (Mandatory Mediation ) draft to ensure that what we are prosing is practical from an execution standpoint. Robert joined us in person for this portion of the meeting and we took the opportunity to discuss all of his input.

We continued to make great progress on this topic.

  1. As one of the functions of MCRC, MCRC pays the dispute resolution centers to mediate between landlords and tenants as an alternative to litigation. This is paid in part with funding from the assessments.
  2. Previously, there were questions raised about whether or not their are enough Community Dispute Resolution Centers (CDRCs) to provide coverage for mandatory mediation across ALL of Oregon. One county which isn’t served is Columbia County. Previous discussions began leaning toward exempting floating home and park residents in counties which aren’t served by CDRCs from this law. There are about 220 floating home owners in Columbia County alone! We wanted to protect them and offer them mandatory mediation as an alternative to litigation. So, today, it was determined that we had enough funding to allow Mediators to travel to underserved countries such as Columbia County in order for Tenants and Landlords to gain those benefits. Hooray!
  3. One issue we discussed is that the law as we’ve written it, requires both parties to meditate in good faith. But Mediators cannot and won’t evaluate the parties. They must remain impartial and cannot be subpoenaed to testify against one party. So, if a party does not mediate in good faith, it will be up to the accusing party to prove it in court.
  4. Perviously, there was an issue brought up that oftentimes, when Landlords have their property managers mediate for them, that the property managers oftentimes make a decision during mediation, and that after the fact, the Landlords will not abide by or enforce the agreement made by the property manager. So we included language that requires a decision-maker to be the one who comes to mediation. Stepping out for phone calls is ok.
  5. The second major part of this issue is the Enforcement element. We would like to fund an attorney to work on certain cases for tenants which cover issues that are not conducive to mediation. Here are the issues to work through:
    • This will be funded by the MCRC assessment surplus.
    • There will not be a lot of money for this person. And it should be one person so that we can effectively “grow” at least one individual in Oregon who KNOWS this small set of laws.
    • Using other sources such as Legal Aid only serves low income tenants and income isn’t a limiting factor for experiencing “bad actor” Landlords. So it is important to have someone who can serve everyone.
    • Do we limit the fund for this attorney to. let’s say, $50,000 per year? So that the atoner doesn’t eat up the entire MCRC fund.
    • Do we place limits on what cases this attorney can take? If the attorney takes a complicated precedent-setting case, the case could take years with multiple levels of appeals and we’d not have resources available to help thousands of other tenants with smaller cases.
    • Do we limit the scope to only issues about certain limited statute laws? If we target the areas where Tenants have the most problems with Landlords and have the most chance of success, then the fund will do that most good, but many valid tenant issues will not qualify.
    • One limit we know we should impose is that the cases should only cover current tenants. Which does mean that, if our marina laws get passed, once a Tenant enters into a post-eviction storage agreement with the Landlords, then this resource will not be able to help that former Tenant. Any issues arising out of that scenario would have to be paid for by the Tenant if seeking litigation. This appears to be an ok compromise. Otherwise, there could be formerTenants using up a resource that they no longer have an invested interest in positively maintaining.

TREES ISSUE:

We have final conceptual agreement on the Trees issue. This is an issue which does not affect marina tenants, unless you have a hazardous tree growing on your deck. In which case, the Tenant is responsible for maintaining it. If the Tenant fails to do so, the Landlord can remove it.

SUBMETERING ISSUE:

We have final conceptual agreement on the Submetering issue. This is an issue which doesn’t affect many marina Tenants and also doesn’t rank on the list of major marina tenant concerns at this time.

MARINA ISSUES:

We have conceptual agreement on the Marina Issues. If you will recall from last month, we were hoping that we could add the capital gains tax benefit to the marina purchase laws. Angela and DiLorzeno were fairly firm on wanting to include it at the last meeting. So, John Vanlandingham will see what magic he can work.

NEXT STEPS:

  1. We will review our Termination of Tenancy Issue and wrap that up in January.
  2. We need approvals on the entire package of issues by formal vote (4 voting members represent us) as is our process.
  3. We will need a February meeting to vote on the language and elements of the language (since LC is not yet done with the draft) and we are still making changes.
  4. Next meeting: tentatively scheduled for February 6th in Salem.