Last week, I got into a little argument with George Hank from Building Inspection. The argument went something like this (yes, its edited and perhaps a little exaggerated, for effect):
Brenda: Housing stock in the downtown is really deteriorating.
George: Well, we only have 7 building inspectors and only a few work on systemic building inspections so we can only get to every unit once every 6 years, the rest work on a complaint basis.
Brenda: Well, how many building inspectors do you need to get to the buildings downtown faster?
George: If I had more building inspectors, I wouldn’t send them downtown, there are bigger needs in other areas of the City. (He did a much better, more eloquent job of saying why they were needed elsewhere)
Brenda: Well, how many?
George: 2
Brenda: What about downtown, I think that especially closest to campus, in Eli Judge’s and Mike Verveer’s district its really gotten bad.
George: It has really gotten bad, in your district too.
The conversation goes on a bit, I think I irritated George a little with my questions, and finally, he kinda (justifiably) sarcastically tells me that the Tenant Resource Center should work harder to get people to call the Building Inspector, since most building inspections are based on complaints.
Then, I kinda got mad, but didn’t saying anything. Then, I got to thinking. Yes, the City of Madison gives the Tenant Resource Center a little over $40,000 to help tenants, including telling them to call the Building Inspector. However, this is about the same amount of money that the Tenant Resource Center got back in 1991 and there have been a significant number of rental units added to the City of Madison since then, not to mention inflation. Anyways, with a little over 40,000 rental units in the City of Madison, that’s a little less than $1 per rental unit. If there is an average of 2 people in rental units, that’s 50 cents per renter. About all you’re going to get for 50 cents is:
CALL THE BUILDING INSPECTOR! 266-4551
Ok, seriously, the real point of this is not if Building Inspection or the Tenant Resource Center should advertise building inspection services or the even bigger question of why City services get pushed off to non-profits with inadequate funding. The point is, I get the feeling that these types of conversations go on all over this City as budgets get squeezed, the City grows and there is no more money for the services that the City needs. Just another reminder of what the budget discussions are going to be like this year as we bend over backwards to pay for 30 cops which we may or may not need.
[Note: If you’re having repair problems, here’s my best (brief) advice, click on the link for more info.
1. Call your landlord, let them know about the problem.
2. Start a log of all the times that you call the landlord, note the date, time and who you talked to.
3. Follow up in writing if you have a smaller, non-full time landlord or you think the landlord won’t do the repair.
4. If you give the landlord a reasonable amount of time to fix the problem and they still don’t fix it, call the building inspector!
There, now I said it, twice. And, for the record, Tenant Resource Center is always taking donations.]
p.s. My Program Director informs me that we referred over 1,000 people to the building inspector last year, which is between 1/6 and 1/7 of the people who call us. That ranks right up there with the number of people we referred to Consumer Protection. The only place we made more referrals to were Small Claims (1700) and the Landlord (4000).
