Guest Opinion | Simon Gibbons: Hiding from the People’s Will – The Rental Board’s Approach to Governance

Pasadena’s unelected and minimally accountable Rental Housing Board seems to be commemorating its first year in office by using the Charter reform process to hide its own failures, and to shield its members from voters’ ability to remove them for poor performance. This should come as no surprise after a year of watching the Board’s members demonstrate that a career in radical protest doesn’t qualify them to build or manage anything. 

Among other failures, the Rental Housing Board has missed its legal deadline to set up a rental registry[1]. Worse than that, it has put other key activities on hold till the registry is created, such as the rental hearing process that was intended to help tenants and landlords. Having discovered in 2023 that building a rental database requires technical knowledge, the Board members ignored the deep well of technical capability in Pasadena and instead carried out a no-bid hiring of a brand-new consultancy from Oakland and Berkeley. To the surprise of nobody except the activists, the untested $425,000 consultants[2] missed the December 2023 deadline, so the Board has now hired a technology firm from India[3], whose own deadlines have so far slipped from June 2024 to August 2024[4]. In the wake of this pattern of delay and failure, the Board is proposing a change to the City Charter to retroactively change the legally mandated deadline[5]. This airbrushing of history fools nobody. 

You might think that there should be consequences for this kind of failure. It seems the Board fears exactly that, and is proposing another Charter change to raise the already high bar for removing incompetent members. Up until now, only a petition signed by either 10% of the voters in a Board member’s district, or 5% of the City’s voters (depending on the type of Board position), could remove a member from office[6]. To limit the ability of voters to remove members for poor performance or other reasons, the Board claims it wants to ensure that the laborious task of collecting thousands of signatures is not carried out for reasons that are “merely frivolous or without merit”[7]. 

Their solution is to give the City Council veto power over any voter-signed petition, this being the same Council that seems to have been cowed into signing off on their no-bid contracts. In response to questions from members of the public at the Rental Board meeting of May 8th, one Board member hypocritically claimed[8] that this might allow special interest groups to pay to collect signatures from voters, even though this was exactly how activists got Measure H onto the ballot in the first place.

This ongoing attempt to cover up failures and ignore the will of the people is a further demonstration of the dangers of an unelected Rental Board of activists. If you agree that the Pasadena Rental Housing Board needs more oversight, not less, you can comment at their next meeting at the Jackie Robinson Center tonight, Wednesday May 22nd, at 6 p.m, or send a comment or letter directly to cityclerk@cityofpasadena.net to comment on agenda item 3 to show your opposition to this attack on public accountability.

Simon Gibbons is a resident of Pasadena, and owns rental property in the city.

[1] Pasadena City Charter, section 1812 b: “within one year of the effective date of this article” [2] pages 15-18 of City Council July 31, 2023 pages 2023 07 31 CC MIN.pdf (cityofpasadena.net) [3] see hiring pages, with 100% of jobs in India: Careers at 3Di – 3Di Systems (3diproducts.com) [4] Phil LeClair, Pasadena Rental Housing Board meeting, April 24th, 2024
[5] See agenda item 4: https://www.cityofpasadena.net/commissions/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2024-05-08-PRHB-AGENDA-PACKET-Final.pdf?v=1714956117184 [6] Pasadena City Charter, section 1811 d : “Tenant members of the Board may be recalled pursuant to a petition signed by 10% of the qualified voters of the district from which the tenant was appointed. At-large members may be recalled pursuant to a petition signed by 5% of the qualified voters of the City.” [7] See agenda item 4: https://www.cityofpasadena.net/commissions/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2024-05-08-PRHB-AGENDA-PACKET-Final.pdf?v=1714956117184
[8] Rental Housing Board meeting May 8th: Peter Dreier at 2:07:20, in response to public comments from 1:24:15 onwards.