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Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a two-part series examining the policies affecting rental properties in Orono. The first part can be found in the April 21 edition of The Maine Campus and at www.mainecampus.com.
In order to combat a slew of issues in neighborhoods with noise and parking arising from the conversion of single-family homes to rental properties, Orono devised a scheme five years ago involving amendments to or the creation of town ordinances.
While the passage of these official ordinances coincides with the change in neighborhood behavior cited by the town’s police chief, the jury is still out on the exact cause of this shift.
According to Orono Police Chief Gary Duquette, nightlife in this town used to be a very different scene.
“I’ve been here for 18 years now, and I remember when I first got here, the parties were huge,” Duquette said. “I mean, it was nothing to go to a party with 300 kids there and having two or three or four of them going on in the same night.
“That’s really rare now,” he said.
In 2006, issues in the community came to a head. Town Planner Evan Richert said he “received a flurry of complaints” about noise and parking “in a couple neighborhoods” that had previously been inhabited by single families.
He said the addition of rental properties marketed to college students brought “a different lifestyle” to once quiet side streets.
“It was just ordinary people carrying out their ordinary lives. It’s just that hours shift and the way that people have visitors over — which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do — is different,” Richert said. “And it ranged from that to things that were abusive — things like trash or people going to the bathroom outside or being drunk or whatever.”
In order to address these issues, the town implemented an amendment to its land use code alongside the creation of the rental unit registration program.
Through these two measures, the town changed the allowable number of unrelated occupants of a single unit from five to three in the two largest areas — the Medium Density Residential and Farming and Agriculture zones — and forced landlords to demonstrate compliance with this restriction.
Duquette said these changes were made to foster “a working relationship” with town landlords and to “get them involved in the whole thing and policing their own rental properties and to have a little more accountability for the whole situation.”
When asked his opinion of how the ordinance alterations have affected Orono’s rental scene, one landlord, who asked to remain anonymous, agreed he has seen changes — but they might not be the shifts the town council intended.
“It did solve the problem — the one of us being able to buy and rent properties in those neighborhoods,” he said.
Chad Bradbury, co-owner of large area leasing company KC Management, said the economics of trying to pay back a 20-year mortgage with only three tenants excluded him from certain neighborhoods.
“You can’t make money on a three-bedroom,” Bradbury said. “Four and five [bedroom units] are the way to go.”
Richert maintained the changes were not intended to force college students out of single-family neighborhoods but were merely a way to halt the creation of large-group rental units in those areas.
“I think they’re trying to edge college students who want to live in groups of four or five people to areas that are zoned for more multifamily kinds of development,” he said, pointing to the downtown and other commercial zones as examples. “They’re welcome in the [Medium Density Residential] district, it’s just that there can’t be five people with five lifestyles and five cars.”
Even with these areas set aside for new multifamily developments, Bradbury pointed to past struggles companies have encountered when seeking permission to build as an indicator of attitudes many town residents have toward the college population.
“It’s funny, you listen to how hard the townspeople fought Orchard Trails, but that’s the solution to all their problems,” he said, adding, “They don’t want the college kids to have any fun, but they sure do like their money.”
Many of Bradbury’s properties qualify for grandfathered status under the ordinance, which allows him to rent a unit to a maximum of five unrelated individuals so long as the building was used in this manner before the new occupancy restrictions were enacted. In this way, he is able to skirt the restriction — at least on his older properties.
Still, he said a lack of action on the ordinance’s conditions by town officials has not spurred him to change his business practices.
“Nobody is knocking on doors and counting beds,” Bradbury said. “If they enforced the green space requirement, I would lose my grandfatheredship.”
Dennis Cross, owner of rental agency Cross Properties, found the move to be a way for the town to blame landlords for problematic units and their tenants.
“To me, all of that is the act of taking the conduct of a third party and making someone else responsible for it,” he said.
“It hasn’t worked anywhere,” he continued. “They tried to make beer companies responsible for drunk drivers, they tried to make the firearms manufacturers responsible for people shooting one another, but Orono’s making it work by making the landlord responsible for the conduct of the tenants.”
Bradbury agreed with Cross’s assertions, saying, “All it is is trying to keep complainers quiet.”
Cross pointed to several of the complaints commonly raised at town meetings as problems already covered by existing statutes. In his view, the changes were an unnecessary and redundant layer of legislation intended to fix problems that could have been better solved by stricter enforcement of existing policies.
“One of the complaints I would hear is ‘There’s cars parked all over the sidewalk,’” Cross said. “There’s already state laws that make that illegal — Orono did not need another regulation on that one. It’s a very simple thing to fix.”
Duquette pointed to increased enforcement of a separate measure — enacted in March 2004 — as the real reason Orono has quieted down in recent years.
“From our view, from what we do, it’s really been the disorderly property ordinance that’s had an impact,” he said.
That ordinance set many standards for conduct deemed proper by the town council regarding issues ranging from excessive noise to fighting, with civil penalties for scofflaws.
By stepping up enforcement of this ordinance, Duquette said his department has been able to keep issues under control.
Even though the police have been able to rein in the more troublesome elements and the town council has limited expansion of rental properties into single-family neighborhoods, Cross encouraged those looking to relocate to Orono to seriously evaluate area demographics before buying.
“I will never be able to understand why people move to a college town and then they’re disturbed when they find college students,” he said. “I just don’t know how that works.”
Michael Shepherd contributed to this report.
