Why Worcester Councilors Are Irate Over 2022 Rental Registry Law They Passed Unanimously

WORCESTER, MA — Blink and you would've missed when the Worcester City Council unanimously approved a new city law requiring the registration of all rental properties in the city, and a related rental inspection law.

The vote happened Sept. 29, 2022, during a special Thursday meeting that was a continuation of a Sept. 20 meeting that had run too long. With no discussion, every councilor — absent At-Large Councilor Thu Nguyen — voted on Sept. 29 to approve the rental registry.

The vote was far from the first time councilors had heard about the registry. The Sept. 29 vote was a followup to another unanimous August 2022 vote on the law, absent At-Large Councilor Khrystian King. That vote was preceded by some discussion, including a request by District 3 Councilor George Russell that the city start with the largest rental properties.

Councilors have been debating a registry since 2019, when former councilor Matt Wally first proposed it. Formal language for the registry was delivered to councilors at the May 24, 2022, meeting, less than two weeks after a fire killed four people living in a Gage Street triple-decker with a history of code violations. The proposal included an endorsement by Worcester Fire Chief Martin Dyer, whose department had recently lost two firefighters — Christopher Roy in 2018 and Jason Menard in 2019 — in fires at rental properties.

“The city of Worcester is all too familiar with the devastating toll of fires,” Dyer wrote in May 2022. “This week alone, over 50 residents were displaced by just a few fires incidents and four residents lost their lives. The rental registry program will not eliminate the hazard, but I am confident that it will have a significant impact on the safety and well-being of Worcester residents.”

Now almost two years later, city councilors are balking at the rental registry law, demanding City Manager Eric Batista change it, and even raising the possibility of repealing it altogether. Property owners Arthur Mooradian and Michael Madulka petitioned the council to suspend the registry last week.

On Friday, Batista proposed key changes to the law, which councilors will review on Tuesday. Batista said he's willing to make changes to appease councilors because deleting the program would be equivalent to the city choosing the convenience of landlords over the health and safety of tenants.

"We can't sacrifice one or the other," he said. "We understand there could be areas where we want to amend [the law], that's part of the process. Maybe this program in one to two years will have to be amended again."

Councilors tore into the registry at the April 2 city council meeting. They expressed disbelief that the city doesn't already have contact information for rental property owners via tax bills, and called fees associated with the program "onerous."

"We have to take a closer look at this before we go forward with this," Russell said during the meeting.

"I feel like this law has snowballed into something more complex," District 2 Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson said.

The law debated on April 2, however, has not changed since the unanimous approvals in 2022, including the schedule of fees and penalties associated with it, and the types of properties that must adhere to the law. Those include regular rentals, plus other types of properties like rented lots and commercial space.

The law requires landlords to pay a $15 per-unit registration fee ($5 annually each year after), with a 10 percent discount for people who register online. There's no fee for owner-occupied rental units. By comparison, dog licenses cost $30 per dog per year, and resident parking passes cost $10 per year. There's a separate fee schedule for rental inspections, which cost $50 per-unit. Failed inspections can end up costing $100 per re-inspection. All the fees will be used to recoup some of the cost of setting up the program, Inspectional Services Department Commissioner Christopher Spencer has said, including the hiring of new inspectors.

One major sticking point for councilors is a $300 per-day penalty landlords pay if they fail to register by the annual deadline. That fee was included in the law passed in 2022.

The Inspectional Services Department has already made a significant investment in the program: hiring new inspectors, buying new vehicles, rearranging office space, acquiring software tools and training staff. The program officially went public last month during a summit for landlords at the DCU Center. The city has also mailed thousands of notices to landlords about the law and registration deadlines. Spencer noted at the April 2 meeting that about 3,000 of those letters have been returned to sender — further proof of how little the city knows about landlords.

According to Spencer, the city needs to build a rental registry that includes contact information like email addresses and phone numbers in case of an emergency. The registry will also act as a census of rental units, which in turn will help the city figure out how to inspect the estimated 50,000 units in the city.

According to Russell, he and his colleagues are pumping the brakes on the law now because they didn't get a chance to properly review it in 2022. The approval votes happened on nights when the council had lots of other matters to attend to. The law was "not vetted properly" at the time, he said.

"It fell through the cracks, the finer points of it," Russell said Friday.

Russell said he would be happy to see the city start from scratch on the law, and has asked for a formal opinion from the city solicitor about how the council can repeal ordinances. He also said he's gotten an earful from constituents, and feels the community should have some input now that the program is actually in effect.

"I think we should try to adjust it and work with the community and the administration to get things done," Russell said, noting he's ready to work with Batista on changes.

Batista's new proposed changes include reducing the noncompliance penalty from $300 per day to $200 per month. Batista is also extending the deadline to register properties from the end of April to July 1.

Worcester is just catching up to many other cities in creating a rental registry. Cities including Boston, Lowell, Albany, Lynn, Hartford and more have registries. Worcester's fees and penalties differ from those cities, and are more lenient in some cases. Lynn charges $25 to register a rental, and in Buffalo, NY, landlords can go to jail for up to 15 days for breaking the city's rental registry law.

There are no formal licenses or requirements to become a landlord in Worcester. The state building code requires inspections of multifamily properties with three or more units, but those so-called "110 inspections" only cover common areas, not individual units.

The Worcester City Council approved the rental registry in 2022 following two major rental property disasters: the quadruple fatal Gage Street fire — a property that's still a hazard today — and the roof collapse at a Mill Street apartment building that left about 100 people homeless. Madulka, who petitioned to suspend the registry last week, was the person who pulled the building permit for the disastrous Mill Street roof replacement, according to city records.

In March 2022, months before those two disasters, Spencer sent councilors a six-page memo detailing his plan for a rental registry. It included many of the items that would appear in the final law, including the $50 per-unit inspection fee. The document outlined a real scenario where inspectors found illegal, unsafe apartments after a two-alarm fire in a triple-decker — eerily similar to what Gage Street tenants described before the fatal fire in that property.

"Getting access to these units, and ensuring public safety, is the primary goal of this proposed program," Spencer wrote.