It's not just that the the People's Republic of Berkeley is raising landlord fees. It's that the city's Rent Stablization Board - which regulates rents and advocates for renters, and is funded at $3.2 million per year entirely by landlords - even exists at all.

More from the Berkeley Daily Planet.

After Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Board decided to raise landlord fees by 13 percent, the city’s leading landlord association is threatening to once again file suit. “We’re strongly considering litigation based on this act,” said Michael Wilson, president of the Berkeley Property Owners Association (BPOA).

...For the past eight years, the rent board has angered landlords by decisions considered pro-tenant, and the BPOA has initiated several lawsuits against it. The rent board runs a roughly $3.2 million operation with about 20 employees, all paid for by landlord fees.

...Wilson questioned why the Rent Board would raise fees when it maintains reserves of roughly $300,000—about 10 percent of its total budget. The city maintains 6 percent reserves.

Additionally, Wilson questioned why the Rent Board required a budget of approximately $3 million to regulate 18,600 rental units when San Francisco spent $4.3 million to regulate 179,000 units. Wilson also took aim at the Rent Board’s allocation of nearly $215,000 for community agencies. For years the program that has most infuriated landlords is an annual poetry slam, where competitors perform tenant-landlord themed spoken word poems for a cash prize.

Whew. In this Stalinist city-state, property owners are the enemy, and authorities make them pay for their own regulation by bureaucrats, for community agencies, and agit-prop against them.

In a word, unreal.

READER EXTRA: More from the Rosenblog archives on Berkeley and Berkeley-ites, here, here, here, and here.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at May 9, 2005 08:18 AM

---