A Senate panel is backing legislation that would establish stronger enforcement of health and safety standards in rental buildings.
The bill, S.79, would establish a statewide registry of short- and long-term rental units. Five employees would be hired to ensure safety codes for rentals are properly enforced. Housing advocates say the protections are long overdue.
“The Affordable Housing Coalition has often felt that the prioritization of rental housing safety perhaps didn’t get adequate attention,” Brian Pine, a lobbyist for the coalition and a Burlington city councilor, told lawmakers. “With 75,000-plus rental households in Vermont, this is a big step forward in protecting residents from conditions they don’t have control over, but that affect their lives in very meaningful ways.”
The Senate Economic Development Committee voted 5-0 Friday to endorse the measure.
Housing advocates and legislators have pushed for years for more robust rental safety enforcement. In December 2020, a study found that nearly 7,000 rental properties in the state had serious problems, such as faulty or nonexistent heating systems.
Vermont has rental safety codes — laws that set safety standards for rental properties, such as the number of smoke detectors a building must have, and a requirement that all bedrooms be outfitted with a window.
The problem, housing advocates say, is that there is no centralized statewide system for code enforcement.
While larger communities like Burlington, Brattleboro and Rutland have code enforcement officers who handle complaints and charge landlords for code violations, smaller towns rely on town health officers, who are registered with the Department of Health and manage other public health responsibilities, too.
Some health officers work on a volunteer basis and not all receive professional training.
S.79 would relieve town health officers of rental inspection responsibilities — without eliminating their positions — by establishing an inspection task force and property registry within the state Division of Fire Safety.
The division would hire five new employees to maintain the inspection service, and landlords would be required to pay $35 to join the registry.
At the request of the Scott administration, S.79 would also establish a new Rental Housing Investment Program, which through the Department of Housing and Community Development would give grants and forgivable loans of up to $30,000 to landlords for weatherization and other refurbishing projects.
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, one of the bill’s sponsors, thanked housing advocates Friday for the years of work they have poured into establishing a more robust rental safety system in Vermont.
The bill “is just the beginning” of what can be accomplished in making properties safer, Clarkson said.
Housing lobbyists thanked the committee for advancing their years-long push. “This is so important,” Sarah Carpenter, chair of the Vermont Rental Housing Advisory Board, told lawmakers. “We’ve been talking about this for a long time.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Sen. Clarkson’s name.
