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BELLEFONTE -- A crowd of concerned residents gathered at the Bellefonte Borough meeting in regards to its Rental Housing Code Ordinance.
Discussed previously, the ordinance has been the topic of discussion at the borough business meeting for numerous public comment sections.
Walt Schneider, Agency Director with Centre Region Code, attended the work session in order to answer any of the council's questions. He first summarized the basics of how these ordinances get crafted.
"The contents of this are a combination of public input, elected official input, staff input -- at the end of the day this is your code. We provide a document that council can work from, kind of like a menu," said Schneider, explaining how the borough can tailor the code to fit their needs.
He went through, section by section, of what members of the public had issues with during the previous meeting.
According to Schneider, section 101.6 regarding tenant rights and section 803.3 subsection 17 regarding utility records are essentially policy pieces for council to discuss.
He also spoke about chapter 11, noting that it wasn't typically enforced. It would be up to the borough to either use chapter 11 from a regional standpoint, or create their own ordinance.
"Really these three things are policy decisions from a council standpoint," said Schneider.
It was briefly discussed what options they had in regards to the complaints and concerns they'd received, before they moved on to the other items on the work session agenda.
"If you take all three out it doesn't change anybody else. We tried to create, as best we can, a buffet method," said Schneider.
The business meeting began and welcomed a large crowd of people, most of which were in attendance regarding the ordinance.
Though the ordinance was originally planned to be discussed later in the business meeting, it was brought forward in the schedule for the convenience of the members of the public in the audience.
For those who weren't at the work session, Council President Doug Johnson gave a brief recap of what had been discussed.
"Every item that was brought to council's attention at the last meeting will be discarded or not approved," explained Johnson. "It actually goes back to the original property maintenance code that we have in place."
Bill Shuey, who spoke at the last meeting about the ordinance and helped to convince the council to table it, was the first speaker again during the public comment section.
He questioned whether or not a member of the Centre Region Council of Governments (COG) was there, and was informed that Schneider was in attendance earlier but had to leave. It was also noted that Shuey was welcomed to contact Schneider with any questions he had.
Shuey also spoke about the use of "State College" throughout the code, questioning why COG didn't create a uniform code for Bellefonte specifically.
Shuey also thanked the borough council for listening to the public, "I appreciate you guys listening to us at the last meeting. It'll save a lot of headaches down the road."
Brian Witmer, another individual who spoke at the last meeting, came to the podium to discuss additional sections that he had issues with. He listed them off for council, discussing them individually and noting what issues he had with them.
Vice-President Kent Bernier cut in during the discussion to make a suggestion.
"It's clear that residents of Bellefonte don't like the changes. One of the communications that I read said 'we're not in favor of the current changes to the Centre Region Rental Code' which makes me believe that these folks were okay with the code the way it was before all these changes were proposed... I'm not in favor of voting for this at all -- any of the changes -- because there's so many problems with so many of them," said Bernier.
The borough decided in the end to not adopt any of the changes unless they were state mandated changes.
In other news:
-- Signage will be posted to the Governor's Park Baseball Field indicating a fine if the field is used without borough permission in an attempt to eliminate individuals who jump the fence to use the field. The council will have future discussions about how to regulate community use of the field, rather than leave it locked.