After a heated few hours of testimony, a bill that would increase state and local government power over negligent landlords ended effectively where it began, under consideration in the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee.
The bill comes after, and is partly in response to, an Aurora complex in disrepair that drew national attention for being an alleged hotspot of transnational criminal activity.
“The situations that have been going on down Colfax, east of here, that you’ll hear about tonight, are, if anything, big enough situations to attract the attention of the attorney general,” Sen. Mike Weissman, a prime sponsor of the bill, told the committee. “But if there is a bad landlord-tenant situation in Steamboat, or even in Oak Creek, we want those to be able to be addressed to.”
Weissman explained that the bill proposes to do three things. First, it adds on to the discretionary authority the Colorado Attorney General’s Office has to enforce landlord-tenant law. The second part of the bill gives cities and local governments that type of enforcement authority, which he said wasn’t as big of a move as it may seem.
“Cities are already in the business of enforcing their building and zoning codes, and we already have, at least in extreme cases, enforcement of public health law provisions by counties or even cities,” Weissman said.
The final aspect of the bill, and the part that drew the most opposition, would add a receivership mechanism to the enforcement of the warranty of habitability law in Colorado, according to Weissman. He told the committee that receivership isn’t new in Colorado law, or as a part of landlord-tenant law across the country.
The city of Washington, D.C. already has a process for receivership in place, under its Tenant Receivership Act. In cases where there are chronic health and safety issues at a rental property, the city’s attorney general can ask a judge to appoint a receiver at the property. If the judge accepts, the court appoints a neutral third party as the receiver, and that party takes control of the property, assuming control of its management and operations and making the necessary repairs to bring the property back up to code. The bill’s receivership process, as currently written, would function in a similar way.
Mike Coffman, the mayor of Aurora, told the committee that the legislation was critical for Aurora and the state at large. The city’s manager for its neighborhood support division, Joshua King, also testified in support of the bill.
“The bill is a vital tool for municipalities, counties and states, especially when dealing with properties that consistently fall out of compliance, negatively affect neighbors and the wellbeing of our community members,” King said. “By appointing a receiver, which is an included part of this, we can ensure that the properties are properly managed, halting their decline and reducing the risk of safety hazards and further deterioration.”
He also asserted that the bill would protect tenants and the broader community and hold property owners accountable.
Support for the bill included city council members from Edgewater and Westminster and a variety of left-leaning local advocacy groups and tenants who spoke about their experiences in neglected properties.
Opposition to the bill in the committee hearing came from representatives from the Colorado Apartment Association, the Colorado Housing Coalition and the Rocky Mountain Home Association.
Andrew Hamrick, general counsel for the Colorado Apartment Association, said that while he didn’t oppose the expansion of the attorney general’s jurisdiction, that he had serious issues with the remedy of receivership.
“The remedy of receivership can never be made appropriate as an enforcement device, precisely because the value of the property being seized is so much greater than the item in dispute,” Hamrick said.
Eric Gill, a property owner and a part of the Colorado Housing Coalition, said that the remedy of receivership is the part of the bill that scares him.
“The warrant of habitability has a lot of teeth, it has a lot of fines and fees, and us property managers have to abide by the warrant of habitability that was passed last year,” Gill said. “And putting this other layer of government, and local government, where they just use that as a tool to hang over someone’s head to take a building in receivership, that is something that’s not good.”
A few organizations, including the Colorado Department of Law, testified in an amend position to the bill. Jefferey Riester, the department’s director of legislative affairs, told the committee that there were no concerns about the expansion of its authority, but that there was a concern about the expansion of local government authority.
“This gives us some pause because it’s an experience that we’ve had in the private plaintiff space, specifically with Juul and opioids,” Riester said. “I won’t call out specific communities or attorneys or anything like that, but I do want to note that during our litigation in that space, we saw many private plaintiffs attorneys going to towns saying, ‘We can help you, we can sue on your behalf,’ which we totally understand and appreciate.”
“However, what we did see is as those cases moved forward, following an agreement with one of those attorneys, the community ultimately was left without much recourse,” Riester added. “The most egregious example that we know of is the attorneys received $100,000 following a successful case, and the community only received $30,000 to deal with the vaping crisis.”
He said the department thought that some level of oversight over the private plaintiff space was worth looking into as part of the bill.
While Weissman and Sen. Julie Gonzales, the bill’s co-prime sponsor in the Senate, ultimately chose to hold the bill from a vote after testimony, Weissman did note that the bill would come back with an amendment ready for the committee to vote on.
“We are still engaging in conversation with a number of the folks who came to us today, and ultimately there will be an extensive amendment wrapping up commentary from groups as diverse as the Attorney General’s Office, the municipal league, individual local governments, organizations representing tenants [and], believe it or not, organizations representing landlords,” Weissman said.
At the time of publication the bill hasn’t been assigned another hearing date.