More Inspectors Are Needed

The California Supreme Court last week upheld a Los Angeles apartment inspection fee--and cleared the way for the city to hire more inspectors.

That’s particularly good news for renters in the northeast San Fernando Valley, where apartments have the highest rate of building and safety code violations in the city. Violations such as exposed wiring and immovable security bars put lives at risk.

The city used to inspect apartments on a piecemeal basis in response to complaints, an approach that allowed small problems to go unnoticed until they exploded into big ones. The problems grew especially acute in poorer parts of town, where tenants were often afraid to complain. Some didn’t know they even had that option.

So in 1998, the Los Angeles City Council imposed a $1 per apartment fee to pay for systematic inspections. But problems developed with the inspection program itself. It soon became apparent that it would take at least six years, not the three the city had promised, to inspect every apartment in the city, a timetable that is simply not acceptable.

And some apartment owners didn’t want to pay for the inspection program.

A group of Van Nuys landlords took the city to court, saying the program violated Proposition 218, which requires that property-related fees be approved by a majority of the property owners or two-thirds of the general electorate.

While the suit challenging the fee wended its way through the courts, the city grappled with ways to make the program work the way it was intended. Stirred by stories in The Times on slum conditions in the northeast Valley, the City Council ordered Housing Department General Manager Garry Pinney to come up with a plan to speed apartment inspections.

Pinney proposed departmental streamlining, a good first step. But the department also needs more inspectors if it hopes to meet its goal of inspecting each of the 750,000 apartment units in Los Angeles once every three years.

Hiring had been on hold until the city learned whether it could continue funding inspections through the $1 fee or would have to pay the money back. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that the fee is directed at business operations, not property owners, frees the city to move ahead.

Responsible landlords should welcome the inspection program as a way to learn of problems before they escalate into more costly emergencies--and as a way to systematically weed out less responsible competitors.

Now landlords and tenants alike need assurances that the inspection program will be run not only in an efficient manner but with enough inspectors to do the job.