City of Butler Councilwoman Lisa Quebedeaux said she has been planning changes to the city’s rental policies after seeing some of the worst living conditions for city residents.

After seeing pest infestations, lack of proper plumbing, faulty heating and more, Quebedeaux said she recognized some ways to bolster the city’s rental property condition reporting without adding new provisions to the city code.

She started discussions with city council to revise the language used on the city’s rental property condition report at the Oct. 22 council meeting. More discussion is expected at the forum meeting tonight. The discussions come ahead of the November deadline to update the form for 2027.

As a nonprofit administrator for Neighborhood Housing Services, Quebedeaux said her understanding of housing policy gave her a unique look into where the City of Butler’s might be lacking. On top of that, work around previous elections gave her a firsthand opportunity to see conditions.

“Before I was elected, I’d been inside literally thousands of houses. I canvassed for the previous federal campaign and then for my own campaign and I went inside a lot of buildings and talked to a lot of people — renters and owners alike,” she said.

Specifically, a recent instance involving a Fourth Avenue property stuck in her mind. She said the house was infested by vermin, which spread to neighboring buildings.

“But in that process, I didn’t just see homes that were infested with vermin, which many of them were, but (some) also had structural defects that were not covered on (the property condition report). Those are not only making these buildings prone to infestation, but also making them near-health issues that affect the habitability of the property,” she said.

She said the biggest gap she sees in the current ordinances come from a lack of a well-defined tenant-landlord relationship.

“None of (the ordinance) concerns the specificity of what are the expectations of a rental property, like how a landlord provides it and how a renter engages with it. We talk to people who are landlords and they say there’s issues. We talk to people who are renters and they say there’s issues,” she said.

She said she believes the starting point of this relationship between landlord and tenant is rooted in its associated documents — the lease, landlord occupancy report and property condition report. But as of its current iteration, Quebedeaux said she believes the property condition report does not go far enough in checking basic conditions.

According to the city’s website, the current property condition report checks for specific smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, damaged or exposed wiring and associated electrical infrastructure, and basic fire safety, such as an annual fire inspection and visible building numbers.

Quebedeaux said she saw a need for more. She began researching state laws, such as the Landlord Tenant Act of 1951; and third-class city codes; such as those in Erie, Altoona and Lancaster. Each varied in length and level of oversight. Quebedeaux said she worked to pull ideas she felt made the most sense as a next step for Butler.

“We can’t just strap us to a rocket and launch us from where we’re at now to where Lancaster is now. That’s too much change too quickly. But there are a heck of a lot of examples coming out of Erie that get us where I think we need to be but in a digestible way,” she said.

While much of the work is aimed to cover what is already on the city’s books and what Quebedeaux feels is normally assumed, she said her experience touring rental properties has challenged those assumptions.

“Everything that is on this list is an item that I’ve heard people tell me face-to-face that their landlord said ‘That’s your responsibility. Go fix it.’ However, every single one of these items are already contained in the International Property Maintenance Code. So, this puts it in front of everybody,” she said.

The International Property Maintenance Code is a model code developed by the International Code Council that seeks to “ensure public health, safety, and welfare insofar as they are affected by the continued occupancy and maintenance of structures and premises,” according to the code’s stated intent. The city has already adopted the IPMC under Chapter 203 of the city code.

The code also determines many of the issues Quebedeaux has seen — such as infestation, structural damage, plumbing and others — to be the responsibility of the property owner. The code specifically states a person shall not occupy as owner-occupant or permit another person to occupy any premises which do not comply with the requirements listed.

When it comes to modifying the property condition reports filed with the city, Quebedeaux said the first thing she wants to do is make sure the report is filed more frequently. She said her hope is the form is filed when leases are made, renewed or substantially changed rather than only when they are made.

“You could have a person who’s been living somewhere 10 years with the home deteriorating year-to-year without any oversight between landlords and tenants on what the condition of the property is,” she said. “That’s where some of the worst health code violations and legitimate danger (exists), sometimes to children living in these domiciles.”

At the top of her proposed revision, she said she wanted to include a clear identifier of the property manager for any given rental.

“With so many tenants I talked to, I said, ‘Who’s your landlord?’ They’d say, ‘I don’t know. It’s just a phone number,’” she said.

She recalled living across the street from a property where “no one had any idea who the person was that was the responsible individual.

“It had to go through legal steps to figure out the owner to contact them and remediate criminal activity happening on the premise,” she said.

Part of her plans to adjust the form include giving landlords and tenants the ability to disagree over issues.

“Right now, if you look online, the form is all voluntary. The landlord goes in there and fills in the stuff. Do we know that there’s been a walk-through with the tenant and landlord? There’s no confirmation on that,” she said.

To resolve this, she is proposing each item on the checklist has two rows of check boxes — one for the landlord and one for the tenant.

“If the answer is no issues across the board, put X’s down there and move on. But it provides an opportunity for the tenant to disagree, even if the landlord does not agree,” she said. “That gives the tenant recourse if working with the city or working with other legal means to find remediation in those issues.

“It gives them some sort of ground to where they weren’t signing a lease that said everything is perfect.”

As for the items on the report’s checklist, she said they are pulled from the International Property Maintenance Code.

“What (the proposed report) does is it takes pieces of the International Property Maintenance Code that are really already on the books and puts it into a form where you don’t have to have a law degree to track down what expectations are,” she said.

She said the items are meant to be commonsense essentials for a property, such as functioning plumbing and heating and a lack of structural damage.

She said the form can be used to ensure protections for tenants, but also for landlords.

“It’s also for their protection, too, because it is the tenant confirming that this is the state of the apartment when they moved in. That could be used to compare the state of the apartment when they are moving out. That can be part of the conversation with things like security deposits,” she explained.

While council was given a quick rundown of Quebedeaux’s plans at the Oct. 22 meeting, she said discussion on her full proposal will take place Nov. 5, with hopes of final approval at the Nov. 23 meeting.

Quebedeaux is also working on a proposed full rewrite of city code around rental occupancy. More details about the changes she plans to propose will be detailed in a future Butler Eagle article.