Waynesboro could do right by its renters: Putting teeth in inspections

Updating our reporting on Waynesboro and rental inspections, yeah, what the city is doing isn’t near enough.

I spoke Wednesday with a representative from the Waynesboro chapter of Virginia Organizing, which has been lobbying city leaders over the past several months to put a more extensive rental inspection program in place.

The basics from our conversation: subsuming rental inspections under a building and inspections department that has one full-time and one part-time employee is far from being what is needed to get the job done.

If you go with the estimate that 41 percent of city residents live in rental properties, and that number comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, so it seems fair to go with that, we’d be looking at having roughly 3,600 rental units in Waynesboro.

A city official that I talked with last week told me that the city investigated 26 complaints involving rental units last year.

You can believe if you want that less than 1 percent of renters have issues, but it strains credulity for most of the rest of us.

The rental inspection program being pushed by Virginia Organizing would change the way inspections are done. Currently, inspections are initiated on a complaint basis; the program that Virginia Organizing is advocating would require regular inspections.

Doing this would require the city to invest more resources into its inspections unit. Looking at cities in Virginia of similar size, it seems fair to estimate that Waynesboro would need a department of five inspectors.

Spitballing that you’d need $50,000 a year for salary and benefits, that would cost the city $250,000 a year.

That’s not inexpensive, but there is a chance to claw at least some of that money back.

Also following the model from other cities who have these programs in place, the city could assess a per-unit fee on landlords for the inspections.

No doubt the property management set would fight the city tooth and nail on this, but ultimately, it would be a cost of doing business that would be passed on to tenants.

If our guesstimate of 3,600 rental units is close, somewhere between $70 and $75 per inspection would seem to cover the salaries and benefits for the inspectors.

I’m assuming here that for the inspections to have any effect, they’d have to be done annually.

The city could also look at an annual rental registry fee to help offset costs.

Bottom line: this is something that we need to do, it’s something that we can do, and it doesn’t have to compete with other services for funding.

The only thing standing in the way is the political will to do it.

Story by Chris Graham