Legislative Takeover with Jamie and Dean

Questions about the content in this podcast? Contact your ACAR Communications Director Kelli Moss by emailing kmoss@akronclevelandrealtors.com. 

Transcript

Well, hey there ACAR podcast fans, and welcome back to another HomeForAll podcast episode. I am Kelli Moss, ACAR's communications director, and I am so happy that you're back with us for today's show. They keep saying that spring is around the corner, but I am having a really hard time believing it with the snow that fell on me on the way into the office this morning.
 
 But weather aside, it's time to heat things up here in the studio with some talk about politics, elections and legislation. And that means that our guests for today are ACAR’s Vice-President of Advocacy, Jamie McMillen, and ACAR's advocacy consultant, Dean DePiero. They are both here in the studio and ready to dish on all the upcoming elections.
 
 And it's going to be a great ride. So, like we always say, grab your coffee and your earbuds and make this spot your home for the next 20 or so minutes. We're happy that you're here.
 
 The ACAR HomeForAll podcast is a biweekly production where we will host interviews, facilitate conversations, and talk about what's happening in the world of real estate. We'll introduce you to important people in your community and help you learn how to grow your real estate related business. This is an adult show, and some adult language might occasionally creep into the conversation.
 
 This podcast is for educational and informational purposes, and the opinions shared on the podcast do not necessarily represent the views of Akron, Cleveland Association of Realtors, Ohio Realtors, or the National Association of Realtors. That said, let's move forward and find out what makes Northeast Ohio the best home for all.

 Well, welcome to Jamie and Dean. Thank you. It is great to have you both back here in the studio today. I assume that everyone is well and fully rested after the holiday and ready to talk about some exciting political updates. It's always a good day to talk about exciting political updates. Kelli, it's great to be back here. Kelli and Jamie.
 
 Well, I'm glad you guys are both here. So Jamie, I'm going to throw the mic to you to kick us off. Awesome. Thanks, Kelli So today I thought we could hit on, the upcoming primary election and a few issues that we are keeping an eye on here locally. Super glad to have Dean DePiero back in the in the recording studio with me.
 
 So thank you, Dean, for making great, great to be here with ACAR and you Jamie. So being an even numbered year, we've got a number of statewide races and some county level races that we'll be tracking throughout the year. Our last statewide was the presidential election, and voter turnout was phenomenal in 24. In fact, I just got an updated report from, the National Association of Realtors that 80% of ACAR members voted in that 2024 election.
 
 Yeah, I thought that was amazing. So much has happened, though, since since then. Dean, what's your take on what to expect for the primary election? Anything at the state or county level? Well, the first thing I want to say is hopefully, although it's not a presidential year, we can have a similar type of participation from ACAR members because, you know, there's important elections up this year, like you said, state county elections, the state legislature, which, you know, puts a framework in place for statewide, but also on the county level, as we've seen in Cuyahoga County, sometimes these housing issues come up there.
 
 So it's important for our members to vote. So the primary election seems to be a little bit, I mean, most of the action, all of the action will happen in the general election. You know, being a midterm, they always say the party out of power at the national level tends to do better. We'll see if that if that, you know, tends to tends to do well.
 
 And Congress is so, so closely divided. There are those who think that the Democrats will take the House and the Senate. But, you know, those trends, don't always hold, but they are trends. Yeah, but they don't always hold. So we'll see what happens with that. But at the primary level now, the only really hot race that I can kind of see is the congressional race.
 
 Max Miller, who's an incumbent, out at Bay Village, represents a number of the suburbs from Cuyahoga County through Summit County out to Wayne County. Yeah. Medina County. He has eight Democratic challengers. Wow. And, so, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of attention on that race right now. I just read an article about the candidates.
 
 One of them is, Ed Fitzgerald, who's for a former county executive. You have a couple. You have a former mayor and and redone again. You have a couple of council members that are running. So it tends to be a active primary. Yeah. We'll see how it shapes out. Shakes out. Of course, the, whoever wins will have to run against a well-funded incumbent.
 
 Right. Who has the support of the president. Seemingly, and, is has an incumbent status. So we'll see how that plays. The district leans Republican, right? By about five points. Last I read. So a Democrat would have to be very well funded. They have to have some, you know, when did their back, if you will, to try to, I think amount of serious challenge.
 
 Like I said, the most of the most of the action is going to be in the, in the, in the general election coming up here in November. Yeah. I would, I would say to even the, our RPAC trustees, as they were looking at whether or not they needed to weigh in on any of the local races, there was really only one, Cuyahoga County Council seat.
 
 Right. That was going to basically be decided in the primary. And so they, they voted to support Marty Sweeney, who's the incumbent for that council seat. So he's been a great friend to the real estate industry for, for years. So and there are a handful of state rep and state senate primaries around our three county area to keep an eye on.
 
 And and we can, you know, we'll keep an eye on those. But really, the general election is where we want to focus to, to see who is good in our issues. So, Dean, you and I have been fairly busy. I mean, right out of the gate. As soon as the new year started with a few different issues.
 
 So I thought maybe we could take a look at some of those next. So, I think the first one that we really were looking at was pay to stay. So that's that rental regulation policy where, if I tenants facing eviction, they have, up until the time of the hearing to make the landlord whole. Do you want to talk a little bit about, the progress that we were able to see there with Cuyahoga County Council?
 
 Right. And and, you know, I think, Jamie, you're your staff has done a really good job, I think, of really getting out and trying to play offense, you know, and instead of playing whack a mole on the defense trying to go out and talk to elected officials, mayors and county reps, county councilman commissioners. So I think your staff should be commended for really getting out there and doing that.
 
 The city stay, you know, we've we've managed to, I think, make some inroads with the Cuyahoga County Council. Talk to them about the issues that we have, maybe some legal issues that exist. But, you know, one of them, one of which is the fact that one and one that I saw right away was when an eviction is filed, when a landlord files an eviction, there is a question whether or not that individual can accept rent while the eviction or whether that takes takes the eviction or, so the whole pay to stay issue.
 
 You know, that may, require a change in the state statute. Even so, we're not even sure that what's being proposed is legal. So I think we've made some good arguments of why the legislation maybe isn't the best, maybe not even legal. And so, you know, we'll continue to talk to the members of council regarding that issue. Yeah.
 
 That was that's always an interesting topic to have a conversation about, primarily because on the surface, I think it sounds like it makes sense. So if the tenants paying all their owed rent, what's the big deal? While it doesn't really account for if it's a if it's a landlord who maybe has a mortgage and other bills that they're relying on those rental dollars or so, and not to mention the potential constitutionality of it.
 
 Right. So the next thing I thought we could talk about is fair housing. So April is fair housing month, and we know a number of communities intend, to recognize the anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. We also, heard some unexpected action a couple weeks ago out of University Heights with City Council looking to amend its local fair housing policy around source of income.
 
 Always an interesting conversation. Dean, what's your take without getting too far into the weeds on that? We could talk an hour about source of income, right? It looks like there's some legislation that will, we'll make some changes based upon some court rulings that are, that are out there to, I want to say soften the source of income rule.
 
 So we're watching that. We've talked to their law director, their assistant law director over there and had some conversations. It looks like it has a pretty good chance of passing. So that would be a welcome development over in University Heights for sure. And we'll keep the members updated on that. Yeah, that was an interesting one when we saw that come across as a, as an ordinance that they were considering, we're also seeing a major uptick, in short term rental regulations at the local level.
 
 So when I say short term rental regulation for the listeners, think about the properties that you see listed on places like Airbnb or Vrbo, things that are not a traditional longer term, rental that somebody is using as their, as their most likely primary residence. So this really started when the General Assembly a little over a year ago, maybe two years at this point started considering a bill that would prevent outright bans, at the local level on short term rentals and so it's really, I think, raised this question around home rule and what is the actual concern here for local governments?
 
 So, Dean, you've been on both sides of this as a state representative and also as as a mayor form of right Parma in the past. So how do you tackle something like this where we don't want to see a ban? It's a private property rights issue. But there are, I think, some legitimate concerns being raised around the legality or maybe not legality, but safety in particular.
 
 And nuisance laws, especially with the short term rentals. So usually how, these issues come up as you've mentioned, someone will put their house, the city or village has no local regulation on on short term rentals. Someone will rent one of these. I mean, it probably happens where this is probably one out of 99 cases, 99 times everything goes well.
 
 Someone, once they're out of town, they travel. They want to rent their house for a weekend or a week or something like that. What happens if someone comes in and they throw a big party? It's 50 or 60 kids there. The neighbors are all complaining. They're complaining to the local authorities. And then low and behold, one of the council members or the mayor wants to write a law that says that you can't either ban banning of, Airbnbs or, these short term rentals or significantly regulating them.
 
 So that's really how it happens. The other thing that you do see is you see potentially the hospitality industry, the hotel industry, or you know, there's an argument that they don't pay proper, lodging taxes and those types of things. So maybe you get, some of those folks involved in wanting like regulation. And so these, these, these issues pop up.
 
 Then what you see how I've seen this being a state legislator, you see maybe the Vrbo or the, AirBnB hired lobbyists, right, who will come in and try to lobby the state legislature and say, state legislature. This is a statewide concern, not a local concern. Right. If it's a statewide concern, the cities generally can't use their home rule powers to regulate it.
 
 This is a statewide concern. The state legislator acts. We want to pass a law that says cities can't legislate in this area. So for many years we have this fight of home rule. What can cities regulate versus the state legislature? What is of statewide concern and what is left to their purview? And so sometimes the answer lands, you know, in the middle somewhere.
  

But there's a lot of a lot of examples of this over the years, all going all the way back to the residency, fights where police officers and firefighters had to live in the community that they worked in. Those laws were, you know, overturned. Well, the legislature said residency no longer applies because it's a of statewide concern.
 
 So without getting too much into the weeds, that that's what you get. So you get these home rule fights over whether a city has the right to legislate in that area versus whether it's a statewide concern. So, you know, again, I think the the local authorities have legitimate concerns over people posting, you know, renting their properties out for big parties and rowdy people and kids and young and angry people were not going to be responsible.
 
 That said, I do think that there's a legitimate, maybe role for for short term rentals in a community, especially one that maybe doesn't have proper, lodging. Sure. That type of thing. So, so that that's basically the fight, how it'll turn out, you know, it depends. There are a lot of cities that have local rules on the books, not on outright bans, but that they have to register the property, pay a permit fee.
 
 Yeah. And that type of thing. We did add, just for our listeners to, a blog post that has a list of the cities that we know about. They have some type of short term rental regulation on the books, and it's something that we're certainly keeping an eye on. But one of those things was super quiet, popped up a little bit when the RNC was here in Cleveland.
 
 And then right, whenever we have one of those unfortunate party houses that, you know, makes the news in a bad way. And then, too, whenever our General Assembly is, talking about restricting some local peace there. So, so shifting to another hot topic, point of sale inspections, right. I was so excited. Earlier this year, we had a couple of early wins that were one I think expected and one that totally caught us by surprise.
 
 But we were so over the moon about. So Cleveland ended the point of sale inspection on vacant properties. That was something we advocated for two years ago, started whenever residents first was making its rounds through city council. And then, of course, Maple Heights extended, the escrow waiver for owner occupant buyers. So, Dean, I guess my question here to you is what insight could you share?
 
 It took us two years, right, for Cleveland to come around to what we asked them to do originally. So, Jamie, it looks like this point of sale, a law policy has been kind of put on the shelf, as you know. And what we said from the beginning was point of sale is an administrative monster, right? You have to not only set up the process, put the fees in place, you have to figure out what you're going to inspect, who's going to do the inspection, how the reinspection works, how the escrow works for a local community, from someone who is a local law director or assistant director prosecutor who's been involved in local government.
 
 In my life, it is an administrative monster. Just thinking about it, setting up that process. And so that's number one. Number two, the studies show that communities with point of sale properties sell for less money. It takes longer. They're less desirable because of all the red tape. Right. We are for, you know, robust inspections of properties. We are for property maintenance inspection codes that are strong.
 
 We are for compliance. Right. But for everybody, not just people selling their houses or rental properties. Right. So that's Cleveland quickly found out. What we were saying is that listen, let's focus on the habitual offenders. Let's focus on walk by inspections and and and getting all the housing stock in place. Let's not slow down transfers because sometimes maybe the person that's buying the property or the entity is going to fix the house up and bring them into compliance.
 
 Why are we slowing them down with red tape? So I think that went into it. They couldn't find the people to hire, they couldn't pay them enough. And budget wise it made no sense. So, you know, I'm hopeful and I think they have some really smart people down there. Cleveland in the building department. Now we got to big and I think Sally Martin does a nice job.
 
 She does. I think Ryan pointed to chief of staff I think I think they're all, They're doing a good job. Let's let them figure out let let's let's do a better job with overall inspections. Everybody. Let's bring the housing stock up. And where there's a low income or elderly, they have a Cdbg money. Let's help these people right.
 
 And let's help fix their properties up if they're qualified. Right. So I think that's what's going into this right now. Yeah. That was such a huge win. I know our members were super excited about that. I was still getting questions about when exactly a vacant property would be triggered. Was it what would happen if somebody was selling and they were moving to a new home?
 
 But the the property, the the home was only going to be vacant for a couple weeks while it was transferring. There were just a lot of questions still two years later. So so I will just jump in and just reiterate, I think the mayor and their staff looked at it. I think they're pausing it. You know, I think that they're looking to restrategize and get away from this.
 
 Right. And look at the overall policy and how can we make housing stock better without putting more red tape and slowing down the housing? Yeah. So, the other thing I thought we could hit on, we've had a number of really great meetings with elected officials from the start of the year, from all over, really. And most recently, we hosted the Cuyahoga mayor's and managers here at ACAR was a great opportunity to talk about how ACAR is the voice of real estate in Northeast Ohio.
 
 So I guess on that note, Dean, do you have any final thoughts about the outreach that we've been doing, the work, the success that we're having, moving the needle on some of these issues? It really feels like there's a lot of momentum right now. So I think your staff has done a great job. I think we need to find time to continue to do this, and we need our members, you know, not only those folks who are part of our legislative committee and our watchdog program.
 
 Folks, we need to stay in front of elected officials and talk to them. We need to attend their events, whether they be a fundraising event or just a community event. Right. We need to be involved when they have, you know, when they're out in the community. We need, we need, we need to be helpful to them, support them, give them information, but stay in front of them and continue to be a resource for them.
 
 I think that that's advocacy 101. We got to stay in front of them. And I think we're doing a good job of setting the bar and, and, and playing offense. And, you know, I just, you know, I think not only will help us with our issues, it helps our members stay involved in what's going on in the community, whether it's a housing issue or not.
 
 I think it's just so important. I couldn't agree more. So I think with that, I want to thank everybody for tuning in today. And thank you, Dean, for joining me, as always. Kelli, back to you. Well, thank you very much. Oh my gosh. For two people who said they didn't have a lot of ground to cover, you guys covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time.
 
 So thank you so much to both of you for being here and for such a great update. It was awesome. Well, that about wraps everything up for me today, and I want to thank our listeners for downloading and sharing the podcast, and I want to remind you to be sure to come back and come back often for more industry content coming your way.
 
 If you loved what you heard today, please do us a favor and share it on your, social stories and tag ACAR every time you share the podcast. You're certainly helping us, but you're also hopefully helping another member at the same time. We appreciate you and hope that everyone out there has a fantastic day ahead. And until we meet again, I hope that you're finding your very own meaning of home for all.