Metro Council members approved changes to a pair of Louisville ordinances Thursday night aimed at protecting renters from lead exposure and other health hazards.
In a contentious 17-8 vote, council members agreed to stop requiring landlords to proactively test their properties built before 1978 for lead hazards and submit the results to the city. The changes instead put the burden on tenants to request inspections by code enforcement officers. Those same officers will conduct visual inspections for signs of lead anytime they are visiting a property for separate issues.
District 19 Metro Council Member Anthony Piagentini, who heads the council’s Republican Caucus, sponsored the ordinances. Ahead of the vote, Piagentini said the changes will allow the city to go after the “1%, 2%” of properties that are exposing kids to lead, rather than punishing all landlords.
“Are we going to focus and go after those properties or are we going to waste time on literally tens of thousands of properties that have never had an issue and have no evidence of being the problem?” he said.
Piagentini said the changes acknowledge that "not all landlords are the enemy," just the ones who don’t follow the law.
Many Democrats expressed reservations about the changes Thursday night, but felt they had to vote yes to save what parts of Louisville’s existing rental regulations they could.
The amended lead hazard housing law still allows the city to take swift action against a landlord if a child living on their property tests positive for elevated blood lead levels. Any positive test would require property owners to have a lead hazard risk assessment done and, if lead is present in the unit, the landlord will have up to 90 days to complete a remediation plan. Landlords who fail to address the lead hazards can face fines of up to $1,000 per day.
The second ordinance, also sponsored by Piagentini, included changes to a separate local law that created a registry of all rental properties in Jefferson County. The changes, which passed 21-4 Thursday, end random proactive inspections of rental units in Louisville, among other things.
Metro Council approved these changes after a deal was struck between Republicans in the state House of Representatives and some council members. The choice for Louisville legislators was simple: Remove measures state lawmakers see as too burdensome to landlords or have Louisville’s lead hazard and rental registry ordinances gutted entirely.
The hope now among Metro Council members is that the General Assembly will back off of passing House Bill 173. The proposed bill would prohibit cities from creating a registry of rental units within their jurisdiction, essentially making Louisville’s lead hazard and rental registry ordinances illegal.
The bill has not yet received a committee hearing, which is the first step toward passage. There are just two weeks left for state lawmakers to pass legislation with the opportunity to override a gubernatorial veto.
Louisville Democrats reckon with power politics
Metro Council Democrats held a caucus meeting ahead of Thursday night’s vote where they discussed pending legislation, including the proposed rental regulation changes.
During the majority caucus meeting, council members debated whether to move forward with the deal struck with state House Republicans. Some questioned whether state lawmakers could be trusted to hold up their end of the bargain or whether they might move forward with HB 173 regardless of the Metro Council vote.
Metro Council President Brent Ackerson, a District 26 Democrat, argued council members are powerless to stop preemption from the Republican-dominated General Assembly.
“They can do whatever they want because they’re a supermajority,” he said. “The bulk of the people that are going to be voting on [the House bill] are nowhere near Louisville, so they don’t care.”
Ackerson told his colleagues that “any portion of a loaf is better than none at all.”
But District 6 Council Member J.P. Lyninger, a Democrat representing Old Louisville, Shelby Park and Park Hill, said he thought they were being presented with a false choice. Lyninger, who was backed up by Metro Council Member Josie Raymond of District 10, said he didn’t believe House Republicans had the votes to pass HB 173.
“Do you want to vote for the party of lead poisoning?” Lyninger said. “That’s why I do not believe the leadership in Frankfort wants to own this issue.”
Lyninger also argued that Metro Council members were engaging in “bad politics” in agreeing to roll over without a fight.
“This is a political question about the permanent dominance of Frankfort over this city,” he said. “If we don’t stand up and fight, if we do not take the information to the public and say, ‘We’re opposed to this, you should be opposed to this, too,’ we are accepting that there will be more and more preemption and more and more loss of local control.”
Lyninger voted “no” on both ordinances.
District 17’s Markus Winkler, who previously served as council president, told his Democratic colleagues that he believed the ordinances not only needed to pass through Metro Council, but that they needed to pass by a significant number of votes.
“My understanding … is that it needs to pass by a fairly wide margin to provide confidence that we’re not just going to turn around and change our mind a week later,” he explained in an interview with LPM News.
Winkler said he has little confidence the General Assembly won’t approve HB 173 anyway. He also expressed frustration with the position council members found themselves in and what he sees as efforts by House Republicans to run Louisville from Frankfort.
“Today, we have four zoning cases and I might vote present on those and say, ‘We should ask Frankfort how we should vote on those rezonings,’” he said, sarcastically.
Louisville residents express concern
A handful of residents signed up to speak on the proposed changes to the city’s lead hazard and rental registry ordinances, all of them in opposition.
Tony Curtis, the executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Metropolitan Housing Coalition, argued that a vote to support the amendments was “a vote to support unsafe, unhealthy and unfair housing.”
“You have become a hostage of the majority caucus in the state legislature,” Curtis said. “I remind you tonight that the lead ordinance was passed unanimously … This was an ordinance that was the result of the most complete stakeholder process I have ever witnessed and, believe it or not, the process even included landlord and real estate groups.”
Tom Fitzgerald, a Louisville resident of 37 years and the former director of the Kentucky Resource Counsel, also spoke in opposition to the changes. He likened the situation between Metro Council and the General Assembly in to the children’s book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”
“It teaches us that if you give a mouse a cookie then next thing they’ll ask for is a glass of milk and on and on and on,” he said. “If you give in to the preemption threat of House Bill 173, it’s highly unlikely you will ever restore what you lose.”
He urged Metro Council to protect children over the interests of lobbyists and landlords.
