FreeStateColorado

Denver’s proposed Meet and Confer policy fundamentally alters property rights and is a backdoor to rent control. Denver landlords, get your lawyers on the phone. Set meetings with City Council members. Get ready to defend your property rights and reject the embedding of “co-governance” with tenant unions as a condition of your rental license. This proposal has NOTHING to do with habitability. It applies to ALL residential rental properties and ALL landlords, not just the 1 or 2 per year who refuse to do their duty as property owners and blow off City fines. By advancing Meet and Confer (subversive!) with a Rent Escrow program for bad actors (with due process!) City Council plays a deceptive game, marrying a potentially useful habitability tool (putting rent into escrow after due process for repairs a landlord refuses to make—about 1 or 2 landlords/year) with a socialist wet dream—forcing landlords to co-govern with tenants and outsiders, violating landlords’ free association rights (MUST meet and confer), forced yielding control over common areas on their property (must provide FOR FREE), and more. Under State law (and the Constitution) tenants can associate freely; that’s how groups like the Denver Tenant’s Union came to be, and § 38-12-509 protects tenants from being retaliated against. Cool. That is right and just. Denver’s Meet and Confer goes well beyond that, granting undue power to tenants, forcing landlords to play (and subject themselves to unearned pressure and agitation), and potentially subject to governance by some sort of outside or City mediator when the landlord rejects the union demands. Meet and Confer is gross overreach and a backdoor to build the operational infrastructure for collective control over the economic and other contract terms of renting. Wake up and get to work landlords. You are not the bad guys. Defend your rights now, before this goes farther.