37 Comments

Thanks for the excellent coverage. It will be interesting to see if the biggest voices are the biggest violators... Proud of the council for their unanimous rejection of the proposed complaint filing fee & really PROUD to be a subscriber.

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Forgive the ignorance, but many Laramie ordinances and services, to my understanding, extend to 1/2 mile outside city limits. Do we know if this would fall under the so-called "donut" arrangement or no?

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Landlords complaining that $20 is too much to pay to register their rentals brining in thousands in revenue yearly.

Also landlords: "A fEE sHould bE reQUired for tHE BroKE TENants tho."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Jan 19, 2022·edited Jan 19, 2022

As usual, Jeff seeks to trivialize the harmful effects of this onerous, illegal bureaucratic regime upon the renters of Laramie. The City Council just voted to try to extract a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR from Laramie's tenants, for the purpose of creating a bureaucracy that will cause rents to go up 10-15% (the impacts are far higher than just the amount of the tax), reduce housing availability, slow and deter repairs and improvements, and drive away business development and economic diversification. It also voted to make it free for bad tenants to file retaliatory nuisance complaints against landlords, which they will threaten to do when their rent is late, they damage their apartments, or they themselves cause a problem (such as by bringing in and farming mold in units that started out free of it). Were the ordinance not certain to be overturned, the city would quickly be swamped with these bogus complaints. Fortunately, the courts won't tolerate the multiple violations of state law inherent in the illegal tax and the unconstitutional ordinance, and hopefully will issue an immediate injunction.

There are ways to deal with the very few problem landlords in Laramie. But flouting the rule of law, or burdening tenants with illegal taxes and higher rents, is surely not among them.

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