Karen Kovacs, Marquette city manager

MARQUETTE — Throughout this spring, the Marquette City Commission has received an uptick in people attending city commission meetings to discuss the issues they are experiencing as renters in Marquette.

At Monday night’s Marquette City Commission meeting, the panel responded by tasking the city with preparing an analysis of current renter protections and related ordinances and providing a list of options, if any, to the cty commission for consideration for protecting the health and safety of renters in the city of Marquette as allowable under the law.

The motion was introduced by Commissioner Cody Mayer, who said that “when I first started on the city cmmission … protecting renters was something I was very passionate about because I was very connected to it; I was a renter at the time. I’ve been a homeowner the last four years so I’ve been kind of disconnected and detached from that reality that 53% of our community are renters and I don’t imagine a lot of the issues I would experience 6 years ago have gone away.

“Everyone on the commission here is a homeowner, but the majority of our city isn’t,” said Mayer. “And if there are ways that we can be doing better to look out for the health and safety of our residents and try to look into this request that keeps getting brought up, I think it may be just good for us to do so.”

According to City Attorney Susanne Larsen, issues between renters and landlords are an issue to be resolved in civil court and the city’s role in rentals is limited to the rental safety ordinance, which is enforced by the rental inspector. In order to rent out a property, landlords must have that property inspected by the rental inspector every three years.

Commissioner Sally Davis suggested that the city put together a presentation educating commissioners and the public on the city, the county and the court’s roles in enforcing ordinances and laws.

“The education component is really important,” said City Manager Karen Kovacs, who said that the city could stand up a presentation as Davis described within four to six months. Kovacs also indicated that people have been sending the city examples of how other cities handle renting, saying that “there have been some example cities that people have tossed our way and so we do have some of that baseline research done,” which would also be included in the presentation.

Some of the complaints the city has heard from renters over the past couple of months have included reports of flooding, sewage in bathtubs and predatory leasing practices. Bailey Quinn, an area physician, has spoken at the public comment portion of several recent city commission meetings about flooding in a renovated garage in her rented house that has affected its habitability.

“If this happened where I lived in Naples, Florida, the city of Naples would be fining the property owner every day for this out of compliance house,” said Quinn. “… I learned that there is no one in the city that enforces these requirements of the landlords. The building codes are a county issue, but yet the city requires a certificate of compliance … I come to you to ask: what can this city do to enforce the requirements to protect the renters?”

Annie Lippert can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 550. Her email address is alippert@miningjournal.net.