Apartment inspections commence

By Elizabeth Kim

The city of Champaign conducted its first-ever inspection of apartment common areas Monday.

The city council approved the program in October of 2005, which intends to search for fire safety code violations in hallways, stairways, laundry rooms and recreation rooms.

Over the next three years, nearly 1,200 Champaign apartment buildings with three or more units will have the common areas inspected.

Tim Spear, Champaign’s city inspector, said approximately twelve apartments will be inspected every week.

He said the areas that city inspectors are most concerned about are fire alarms in the hallways.

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Susan Salzman, Champaign’s property maintenance supervisor, said the program would encourage landlords to keep up to code since each apartment will be checked once every three years.

“Every apartment will be inspected every third year, and they will be inspected for basic life safety items,” Salzman said.

She said landlords are expected to complete a self-inspection checklist during the other two years.

“In the two years in between, (owners are) asked to fill out a self-inspection checklist where they are expected to inspect the buildings themselves and provide us information regarding what they found during their inspections,” Salzman said.

Spear said landlords are given a 30-day notice to correct their code violation, and the city will conduct another inspection to make sure they corrected the violation.

He encouraged landlords to not lie on their self-inspection checklists since “(city inspectors) will eventually catch them in their lie.”

However, not everyone finds the new inspection program to be very effective in preventing fire safety violations.

“(The program) is not going to be very helpful because they will not be inspecting the inside of the apartments and the overwhelming majority of problems that students complain to us about are in the apartment itself, not in the common areas,” said Esther Patt, director of the Tenant Union.

Patt said city inspectors will not look for things that really concern students such as a leaking roof, a broken patio door lock, or a broken toilet.

Patt said the main problem is that the city inspectors are not inspecting apartments since it only checks common areas.

“There are some serious fire safety problems in apartments that they are also going to miss like some landlords rent four bedroom apartments but one of the four bedrooms has no windows. So the city inspector is going to miss that because they are not going to look inside of the apartment,” Patt said.

Salzman agreed with Patt that more areas of the apartment should be required to be inspected.

“Well, at this time our council has given the approval for us to inspect common areas only – there is absolutely nothing that I can do to change that,” Salzman said. “Even though that I think that all areas of every apartment should be inspected, I do not have the approval from the city council to do so at this time, so we are going to do the best we can with what we can see.”