The Beverly Hills City Council agreed this week to maintain a rental registry as part of its Rent Stabilization Ordinance, including staffing to complete the registration and appeal process.

The registry received some pushback from landlords and tenants over privacy concerns, but council members have said the data accumulated would guide RSO enforcement.

Mayor Lili Bosse said the process is “moving in a positive direction,” and the city’s landlords and tenants are “not as far apart as one might have thought.” But other terms remain controversial.

One landlord referred to the Montagues and Capulets, feuding houses in “Romeo and Juliet,” to describe the standoff between the sides on other issues, such as the allowable annual rent increase landlords will be able to charge their tenants and relocation fees.

Tenants favor the 3 percent annual increase currently in effect as part of urgency provisions the council approved in January. Tenants have complained of being priced out of their units, and receiving no-cause evictions –  in which tenants on month-to-month leases receive 60-day notices to leave their units. Due to the urgency ordinance passed in January, and amendments made to it in February, landlords are required to pay relocation fees of up to $12,394 – depending on the size of the apartment, and potentially more if there are senior citizen, disabled or minor occupants – to no-cause evicted tenants.

Landlords don’t want to dip much further below the 10 percent that had previously been allowed. Covering costs of renovations to their properties was one of the main reasons many of them cited as to why they want a return to the 10 percent increase.

According to state law, the city’s registration and any following appeals regarding rent amounts provided to the city must be completed within one year of adoption of the urgency ordinance, since it establishes a system of rent controls. A few landlords have contended that the city is not beholden to the one-year requirement, but a city staff report states that their argument is “not supported either by the language in the State [statute] or by case law.”

Councilman Les Friedman, who was elected to council two months after the urgency ordinance was adopted, said the council should have pursued a consensus between landlords and tenants before enacting the urgency ordinance. Some landlords have said no-cause evictions may never have been prevalent enough to justify the passage of the urgency ordinance.

“I’m not sure every tenant in our community needs the protection we’re talking about,” he said, adding that more data would have helped inform the process.

Councilman Julian Gold echoed the sentiment. “We don’t know what we don’t know.” He added that the council “didn’t do this in the most orderly fashion.”

Councilman John Mirisch, perhaps underscoring the assertion, took issue with the lack of tracking of past rent increases the registration forms would provide. A landlord, for example, could have raised his rent more than 3 percent since the urgency ordinance went into effect, he said. But council members said the collection of that data could inhibit its ability to meet the one-year deadline, and the current data collection would provide a “baseline” to track future rent increases.

The deadline for rental registration is Sept. 22. The city has received 474 property registrations (representing approximately 48 percent of registrants) and another 167 have been started. After the registration cycle has been completed, staff will provide a “more accurate estimate” for the program’s budgetary needs in the 2018-19 fiscal year.

The city’s effort to bridge the gap has included a series of mediation sessions facilitated by Sukhsimranjit Singh, associate director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine.

“People do want to understand each other at the end of the day, if given the proper platform,” he said during a presentation to the council summarizing his seven sessions.

Councilman Robert Wunderlich said the mediation sessions have helped make the process a “model of how the community can discuss contentious issues.”

“These are important decisions, these are people’s lives,” he said.

Next steps could include an expert consultant to guide the final decision on provisions such as rent increases, and exploring the possibility of a landlord/tenant mediation board.