New city rental inspection program may start with West Central pilot

The city of Springfield is looking to go live with an 18-month pilot of a rental inspection program soon.

At a Springfield City Council lunch presentation Aug. 12, Martin Gugel, director of Building Development Services for the city, outlined a draft resolution that could be taken up by council to launch the program. Some details, like a potential requirement for property owners either to reside in Springfield’s urban service area or to have a local property manager, are still being worked out.

Safety is the goal, according to Gugel.

“The goal of the program would be to improve the safety and quality of rental housing for tenants while supporting landlords in meeting the minimum standards,” Gugel said.

He said the pilot would target the West Central Neighborhood Service District, a neighborhood service area with a high concentration of rental properties versus owner-occupied structures, as well as with numerous blight and nuisance cases. The average age of structures in the district is 102 years – the third-oldest average age among districts, surpassed by Grant Beach, with an average structural age of 106, and Midtown, at 105. West Central is also a neighborhood that has had a large number of nuisance complaints. While those situations are not ideal for renters, they are perfect for the pilot, according to Gugel.

Gugel said the district has 1,541 single-family and duplex rental units. That’s not all of the housing units in the district – there are 6,437 housing units total, including 1,341 single-family homes that are not rental units.

After an initial four-month preparation period, during which BDS will hire an inspector and office administrator for the pilot, all 1,541 single-family and duplex rental units will be inspected over a 12-month period. Data will then be reviewed and the plan adjusted for two months, and council will decide whether to expand the program beyond the initial pilot.

“It’s going to enable us to test the parameters of the program on a much smaller scale,” he said. “We can gather data and refine it before we would expand it to encapsulate more rental units or more areas of the city.”

Gugel said the program will begin to address issues that exist with West Central-area rental properties, but it will also serve as a source for data that currently doesn’t exist.

“This will give us a collection vehicle to be able to get that data to make better-informed decisions as we would move forward,” he said.

Success measures will include the compliance rate – the percentage of properties brought up to code within 30 and 60 days of inspection. A cost analysis will also be conducted. Officials will be looking to determine the extent to which housing conditions have improved in West Central through the project as an indicator of whether the program should be expanded and made permanent.

The ultimate goal is for all rental units in the city to be inspected every five years, according to Gugel. For the pilot, the work can be completed with one inspector and one office administrator. That’s about seven inspections each workday, as Councilmember Brandon Jenson noted.

There will be a $35 registration fee per unit, per year, an amount that includes the first inspection. Follow-up inspections would cost $50.

The program’s startup cost, including vehicle, technology and office needs, is estimated at $80,000. The annual cost for the pilot is estimated at $238,000, with $69,000 of revenue projected from license and reinspection fees.

Concept outlined
The timeline to begin the pilot program is uncertain, according to city spokesperson Cora Scott. Council’s Community Involvement Committee will now begin revise the proposed legislation, which will ultimately go to the full council for a vote. A target date will be set at that time.

Through the pilot program, owners would fill out a registration form and be responsible for keeping information updated.

If a structure is occupied, BDS will provide tenants 14 days’ notice of an upcoming inspection with a consent form to be returned to the office. If a response is not received by the deadline provided, an administrative search warrant will be requested by BDS, Gugel said.

If a property passes inspection, a certificate of compliance will be used and must be posted, along with their rental license, on the property.

The rental inspection program idea was broached in April 2024 by Gugel’s predecessor, Brock Rowe, as part of an eight-point plan to address dangerous properties in the city. The idea, Rowe said at the time, was to develop a program that ensures safety and quality and is practical, efficient and right for Springfield.

Other parts of the plan, whose goal is to tackle the city’s dangerous properties, were to more effectively track rental properties, moving past a registration database that was last current in 2019, to update relevant codes and to move from complaint-based code enforcement to a more strategic approach.

Residency requirement
As it is currently written in draft form, the ordinance would require that property owners either reside in the city’s urban service area or have a property manager with an office here. There would be exemptions, Gugel said, for owners who live in a surrounding community or who own fewer than four properties. Those owners could lose their exemption if a violation occurs and they are not responsive to it.

That portion of the draft gave Mayor Jeff Schrag pause.

“That last one just seems really overreaching to me,” Schrag said. “I get the intent, that you want somebody to pin something on.”

Gugel said there is a problem with absentee owners of rental properties, and the idea is to have somebody local to deal with issues.

Councilmember Heather Hardinger said there is an issue where owners are impossible to contact by phone or other means.

“A big concern is that if a property is unsafe – so if it ends up being one of these blighted properties at the end of having been put through our process – that’s just not ideal,” she said. “If we can prevent that by having at least somebody that we can reach out to that can be available, that seems like a reasonable requirement to me.”

Councilmember Derek Lee said problematic out-of-town landlords are a rare exception.

“I would say by and large the people that live out of town have got nice rental property because most of the rental property is very nice,” he said. “What we’re doing is that extreme part of this is going to apply to all the good people.”

Councilmember Callie Carroll said nuanced problems like the clause under discussion are the reason it has taken a year and a half to get the program off the ground.

“We’re talking about life-saving measures, and we need to just make sure that we’re very clear,” she said. “I think this is the thing that people are going to hang up on.”

Hardinger agreed that whether a landlord lives in the urban service area or not, the hope is that they are willing to solve the problem.

“The issue is, for a lot of these properties where folks live out of state, the accountability isn’t there,” she said. “How do we build that into something like this is the question.”

Gugel said the goal was to have someone responsible within driving distance.

“The worst case, we could have the inspector drive to whatever the place of business or residence is so that we could try to have a face-to-face,” he said.

He said that is an issue BDS is seeing in blighted cases.

“We’ll do a title search, and it’s a long laundry list of individuals and LLCs that are not here,” he said. “A lot of the times, we’re not able to make contact at all.”

Gugel said enforcement would still be possible without the residency clause. This would be accomplished through administrative hearings, municipal court, fines and other measures by using certified mail. It would remove what he called the ultimate hammer – not to be used often –  which is a request that utilities be turned off at the owner’s home or place of business until the problem is resolved.

“We would probably have to look for a different final hammer and figure out what that is for those few cases where you’ve got somebody that just is not interested in playing ball with us at all,” he said.