New Fee Catches Property Owners Off Guard

By Jorge Casuso

June 23 – Local property owners are flooding the city’s fire department with calls complaining about a new $60 inspection fee for apartment and commercial buildings.

After years of having their properties inspected free of charge, the owners of some 7,000 apartment and commercial buildings began receiving the bills two months ago, or nearly one year after the City Council approved the new fee.

“It came as quite a surprise to receive a bill for service we’ve received for free for the 45 years I’ve been here,” said Robert Sullivan, president of Sullivan Dituri Realtors, one of the largest property management firms in the city.

The fee – which covers the inspection of common areas in multifamily residences and non-high rise commercial buildings – was approved by resolution last June to help bridge a looming budget gap, but did not go into effect until the City could hammer out glitches in the billing, City officials said.

“It is catching people by surprise,” said Fire Chief Jim Hone. “We’ve received a couple of hundred calls since we started invoicing. If we could provide the service for free, it would be fine, but that is no longer the case.”

The $420,000 a year generated by the fee helped the fire department, which lost a fire safety education specialist in the financial crunch, avert further cuts, Hone said.

Some of the complaints have come from owners of small apartment buildings who say it is unfair that they must pay the same fee as the owners of larger buildings, Hone said. (The fee covers building with at least three units under a common roof.)

But setting a standard fee makes sense, Hone said, since it takes only 15 or 20 minutes more to inspect a large building, while setting different fee structures would be complicated.

“It didn’t make sense to put (the difference) into nickels and cents,” Hone said. “We’re charging the least amount we could charge to bring in enough revenue to maintain the number of inspections mandated by the state.”

Some of the property owners have also called to complain that they are being illegally taxed, a charge Hone disputes.

“This is not a tax, it is a user fee,” Hone said. “It has been looked at legally.”

The City has had the ability to charge the inspection fee for several years now, but during good economic times chose to absorb the cost, said Judy Rambeau, the assistant to the City Manager in charge of community relations.

The new fee came as a surprise to many property owners, who either forgot or never knew the council had approved the resolution, City officials said.

It took until recently for the City to sort through business license, planning, utility and fire department records to establish the appropriate recipients of the bills.

As a result, the first wave of bills “started trickling out about two months ago,” Hone said.

“They’ve sent notices out in three waves and each time they go out, we get a lot of calls,” said Rambeau, who estimates each billing has generated between 50 and 100 calls.

The City will send out the rest of the bills this month, then resume on a regular schedule sending out half of the bills next January and the other half next June, Hone said.