Beverly Hills tenants and landlords continued to pave the way toward an amended rent stabilization ordinance at a meeting on Tuesday night at the Roxbury Park Community Center.

Sukhsimranjit Singh, associate director of the Straus Institute for dispute resolution at Pepperdine University, was appointed by the City Council to lead a series of discussions between tenants and landlords. Two committees – one comprised of seven landlords, and the other one seven tenants – were formed Tuesday, the fourth session. Members of each side talked among themselves for most of the meeting to continue articulating their most important objectives for a revamped rent stabilization ordinance.

The sessions have been “civil,” Singh said, despite occasional tensions between both sides since the City Council has been addressing this issue.

“It’s easy for us to mistrust,” he said. “It’s difficult to grow.”

Singh will meet with the impromptu committee members on Sunday at the community center to hopefully arrive at a consensus over the terms to include in the ordinance that will eventually go before City Council.

Sticking points between the two sides include the rate at which landlords will be able to raise their rents. Landlords have said too much restriction could inhibit their ability to keep up with rising costs of maintaining their properties, but tenants have pointed to excessive rent increases as one of the primary factors displacing them from their units. Before the emergency ordinance went into effect, landlords were allowed to add 10 percent to their tenants’ rent each year. Then-Councilwoman Nancy Krasne said there are plenty of landlords in the city who haven’t been raising rents to the maximum allowable extent every year, but, in other cases, regulation could help prevent pricing longtime residents out of the units.

Singh also said he will likely provide an update on the proceedings to the City Council at its Aug. 8 meeting. The council members, he continued, have said the feedback generated in the sessions would weigh significantly into the language that makes it into the final draft of the ordinance before council votes.

In January, the City Council passed urgency measures to reduce rent increases to 3 percent per year, and to curtail the number of evictions. Mayor Lili Bosse, who was a councilwoman at the time, said the city was “way overdue for a change.”

One of the problems the city’s renters faced was the threat of receiving a “no-cause eviction” – a 60-day notice for tenants on month-to-month leases to vacate their units. The next month, in February, the council approved amendments to the urgency ordinance that required landlords to pay relocation fees, ranging from $6,193 for a studio to $12,394 for two or more bedrooms (with additional rates for units with a senior, disabled or minor tenant), to no-cause evicted tenants.

The council also instituted a registry program database to help the city monitor compliance with the ordinance. According to a city staff report from the council’s February meeting, tenants and landlords showed support for a database and a rental registry. The city of Los Angeles has a rent stabilization ordinance that generally covers rental units built on or before Oct. 1, 1978, and includes registration.

But Beverly Hills residents and landlords also had privacy concerns. Other cities, including West Hollywood, have collected rental data for decades.

The City Council also told residents that the urgency ordinance would not necessarily serve as a model for a long-term reboot of the city’s rent stabilization ordinance. Vice Mayor Julian Gold, a councilman at the time, said that the provisions in the urgency ordinance were “not likely going to be on the table in a couple months.”