A group of Guadalupe residents have partnered with attorney Stew Jenkins to challenge the city’s rental inspection program, which mandates annual warrantless inspections of all rented properties.
Jenkins, who presented a 12-page letter to the Guadalupe City Council on May 2 protesting the rental inspection program, said 17 residents are working with him to contest the 2016 ordinance that created the program, which they believe violates their constitutional rights.
“We’re hoping that the City Council looks at this and realizes it was a bad idea in the beginning and it violates people’s basic fundamental rights,” Jenkins told the Sun. He pointed specifically to the Fourth Amendment, which requires government bodies to obtain a warrant before conducting inspections.
Guadalupe’s City Council adopted the rental inspection program ordinance in May 2016, providing a one-year grace period for landlords and tenants to ensure their properties are up to date before implementing the annual inspection mandates. That grace period ends this month.
“I think what happens is once the enforcement starts, suddenly the gravity of the situation comes to everybody’s mind right away,” Jenkins said.
He referred to a similar ordinance adopted in 2015 by the San Luis Obispo City Council. That program also began with a one-year grace period, but when the grace period ended, widespread protest of the rental inspection program succeeded in pushing the City Council to repeal it.
Jenkins said he hopes his efforts see the same success, aiming to convince Guadalupe’s councilmembers to suspend implementation of the rental inspection program until they are able to repeal it altogether, which he estimated would take a couple of months.
The Guadalupe City Council met on May 9, but councilmembers had not addressed Jenkins’ letter by the Sun’s press time.
This article appears in May 11-18, 2017.