Englewood Story

Link: http://www.ci.englewood.co.us/Index.aspx?page=952

Shortly after the new Boarding House Code was enacted our appeal regarding Ducky's new fence was subverted and lost by a part-time municipal judge, John W. Smith III. The run off felt as confusing as being Dorothy in Kansas fleeing from the witchy neighbor and finding herself with a bump on the head from the ensuing tornado.

In the three inch volume of Englewood Municipal Ordinances, the City spent all summer "cleaning up household items." This is to say, "cleaning up mistakes, errors and accidents which shouldn't have officially occurred given the presumption that enacted law is always true, thorough and authoritative."

The "sweep up" of course wasn't meant to help individuals who have been victims and prosecuted under the errors, nor does it necessarily mean the City is returning to any measure of good sense. In fact, it meant that they are adding layers to their bad faith like pieces of furniture to the cyclone. They simply added more things to wollop the disoriented.

Because the neighbors had now taken to circumventing the issue of us housing up to three unrelated people of color in their neighborhood with unfounded parking complaints and foot traffic, they then complained to Planning and Zoning Commission that we appeared to be rushing to complete our driveway. On July 8, 2008, a secret study session where the public was generally not allowed, Council representative Bob McCaslin enabled as to our neighbors.

Both McCaslin and representative Penn intended to keep their word to get behind the neighbors all the way and help them "fight the good fight". At the close of the planning and zoning meeting, Planner Tricia Langon instructed that "no one repeat anything" that had gone on, and further kept these minutes from being published until I found out about them through an open records request on September 2, and complained publicly to City Council.

Sudddenly, the fact that the Drakes complained we were "rushing to pour the driveway," was somehow unacceptable as though hurrying to obey a law that was about to be enacted was illegal. In fact, we were naturally continuing the work on our driveway to enable our 84 year old mother aided by a walker easy access to our home for family get-togethers. Easy access meant getting her into the side door.

So, that hot July day we built the framework and had the dirt delivered, Ducky's wife, Anne, called the police on us. Commander Contos explained that our driveway could not be completed without a site plan approval. I explained to him, along with Code Enforcement Officer Carolin Faseruk wickedly standing beside him, that the City already had an approved copy of our site plan on file evidenced by our blue prints.

Commander Contos looked down at his shoes and said, "Well, it certainly looks like there is just dirt to me, so I'll leave you with just a verbal warning instead of the Notice of Violation."

We then received a letter from Tricia Langon, Senior Planner, stating that she had double-checked. Since the building department had invalidated our permits, this blanket act included our site plan, thus, we were required to apply for a new one.

I went down to City Hall, brought a copy of our site plan for parking, and it was stamped approved and e-mailed back to us by Brook Bell.

There is really no such thing as this invalidation of a site plan already approved because, according to City Code, the approved initial plans were valid for three years after approval, but I understood that the City needed to help Anne and Ducky swoop, fly and deposit their poop on our heads for the sake of saving "The People's Dignity."

This little charade was continued however, in the new Boarding House Ordinance as it was enacted.

City Council brought it forward to vote on September 15, 2008, with a requirement for a site plan to be formally approved. And, when they applied the new ordinance to us, the memo from Alan White in Community Development was that a yet another site plan application with drawing be submitted...for the third time!

All the lingo in the application was toward new development, new zoning, new plans, requests for variance of proposed properties, etc.

Reading it clarified to me that all of zoning's powers lie in forward planning, and not in retrospective application of law. I felt there was a dim arc of a rainbow,-- promising what?... I still couldn't grasp.

We had poured our driveway and parking areas. Our entire project was complete. There was nothing new left to apply for.

Certain aspects of the boarding house Ordinance were indeed passed through Planning and Zoning Commission, where Chairman Bliele and two other members refused "to step on one person's toes" "especially where a great amount of personal investment had already taken place by relying on the old code." But others, including Contractor Steve King, who had built a house on our block, voted with the City's recommendations to ungrandfather us.

Dorothy went to Oz and applied for "Home". The Great and Mighty Oz made her go to the fire to bring back the Witch's broomstick before he would send her home. Oz had no power to promise this, much less to accomplish. He himself was stranded in the Emerald City.

When Councilman Joe Jefferson proposed to City Council a modification to their original ordinance, September 15, 2008, his idea was not based on almost 400 Englewood Citizen's petitions to honor the Constitutional right to choose or to freely assemble, to grandfather the existing boarding house into the new laws. Nor did he concern himself with Mr. Doug Cohn's weightier reminders of illegalities. Instead, Joe in his Council Choice spot that night, told the neighbors his intention was to shift liability elsewhere. He asked to speak with them after the meeting.

The proposed amendment to Ordinance 55 came as a surprise, however, to some on Council.

Councilman Wayne Oakley complained that the proposed change to the ordinance had not been included in his Council packet, and that he had not had a chance to review it yet.

Mayor Woodward said in a prepared moment preempting the discussion, that considering it was Constitution week, he felt bad bringing the ordinance forward for a vote and that Council needed to at least appear to be honoring the grandfather clause in the City Ordinances.

Council agreed that City Clerk, Loucrisha Ellis, should read the proposed amended ordinance aloud.

Proposed amended Ordinance 55 was a surprise to most everyone, including the Planning and Zoning Commission. This procedure proved to be more than just a surprise, however, in that it violated the City Charter, Section 58, where it states that all proposed amendments and modifications to ordinances must be brought to Planning and Zoning for review, even if Council chooses not to heed their recommendation on it.

Thus the illegal and overbroad Emergency on Boarding Houses came full circle. Ordinance 55, in its shining seven point cunning entirety outlawed rather than grandfathered our boarding house, enacted, October 6, 2008. But Dorothy had a good heart and lots of help from her friends, and she was not the one stranded behind the curtain.

The elaborate curtain of deceit works against the one hidden behind it, because it prevents the hidden to see the truth. I am amused to discover the trilogy of Dorothy in Oz was originally a political commentary, written in a child's fairly tale metaphor.

Link: http://www.EnglewoodStory.com

July 15, 2009
Governor’s Office
136 State Capitol
Denver, CO 80203

Dear Governor Ritter,
I am writing to request your assistance in righting a wrong in Englewood, and possibly throughout the State of Colorado.
I read your Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing 2005-2010 in my research of my own situation, and I see that you are concerned with issues regarding zoning laws and fair housing laws.
We are one house in one city of the State of Colorado, but our City attends the National Conventions where these zoning laws and powers are formed, and in our latest City Council meeting, the Mayor (Jim Woodward) noted that the City of Vail has fashioned their own zoning ordinances after ours. I know other places have similar ordinances as well, and so, I’m asking you to take special Notice of the effect of a City’s Household Ordinance, and in particular our Boarding House residential ordinance.
Two years ago, we purchased a HUD home and designed a five bedroom single family house (this term is used in both building codes as well as in real estate marketing terminology) and then built it.
We have hosted people in transition, only one or two at a time for many years in the City of Englewood, and more recently enjoyed keeping Denver Seminary students earning a Masters in ministry, providing a home away from home for them. We built this house with private bathrooms for the intention of hosting three students at a time. The house ended up being a four bedroom house so that the fifth room could be a music room and guest room.
We followed all of the building codes, but right before final inspection, a South Korean student who was desperate to speak the language better and could not eat the cafeteria food that Teikyo Loretto heights was offering, came to live with us.
That very week, our neighbors on either side began complaining to Community Development and asking about zoning laws. Up to that point, we had all gotten along very well. When a mixed race female moved in, the neighbors freaked out and threatened us personally that they would shut us down even if the City refused to take action.
We asked them what was really behind the matter. Had we abused parking privileges? Had we offended them in some way? They answered, “NO! You are simply against zoning laws, and there was a Korean student who shot up Virginia Tech, and you haven’t pulled Criminal background checks on these guys.”
We hadn’t pulled criminal background checks on our neighbors either, before we bought our home, and now we wished we would have!
We wrote to the City Manager twice, and the City Council members, each one, but no-one bothered to answer us. We didn’t know yet that our City Manager lived only 4 houses away from us, kitty-cornered. We also didn’t know that when we were determined to be innocent that they would work so hard to make a new law retrospectively and specifically to target us so that we would be deemed illegal.
So, we called our newly elected District Representative Jefferson, who said that when he was elected, he asked the City Manager about our problem. The City Manager told him that not only was he going to prosecute us for violating the definition of household, but that he was also studying our building permits to see where they could foul us up. (I have e-mails to verify this).
Because the Building Department Supervisor couldn’t find any difference between boarding house building codes and regular single family housing, the City chose not to tell us that we were a boarding house, but to prosecute us for violating the definition of household, and to get the plumbing contractor to abandon his final obligations of his contract and to write a letter the very day we called for final building inspections (January 3, 2008) to ask to be released from his permit and contract with us.
Instead of the City investigating the issue, they let Castle Plumbing contractors be released from its responsibilities to us on January 7. The City then invalidated our building permits. On February 18, 2008, they closed our plumbing permit, so that there were no further permits active. They had performed a final on our active permits, but they cited us for a lack of caulking on one toilet stool, and also refused to use the ladder and flashlight we had provided to go up into the attic to make sure the exhaust pipe had been turned around. Finally, they also cited us for being 1degree over the 120 degree heat mark allowed for a shower upstairs. There were no danger or safety issues at stake, but their intent to frustrate us financially and buy themselves time to get us out of our City Manager’s neighborhood worked.
We won the first prosecution because for one, the City succeeded in scaring off the mixed race female housemate with their Notices and threats the week of Christmas (2007), so although we notified the City Manager that we were in compliance with the household code, they served us with a Summons anyway. Our foreign Korean student had no-where else to go, and we couldn’t throw him out in the cold. But, another reason working for us, was that we figured out we were a “boarding house” according to the City’s Small Group Home code and that we could house up to 8 unrelated people. We wrote a Motion to Dismiss based on that. The City’s special prosecutor, Alan Katz, agreed with us, and against the direction of the City’s regular attorney, he wrote his own Motion to dismiss. What could the Judge do?
The judge dismissed the City’s household violation case against us on April 25, 2008. Three days later, the City initiated a City wide Emergency, called the Emergency Moratorium on Boarding Houses, completely ignoring the City’s definition and processes for emergencies and emergency ordinances.
They spent the entire Summer building a new Boarding House ordinance in which they took them out of the Group Home section of the code and put them into the Household section of the code, according to the Table of Uses.
None of this makes sense because households are still not allowed any more than 2 unrelated persons. The two unrelated persons does not have a measurable chart or definition to measure relationships by, and boarding houses are allowed up to four guests at a time. Even the Senior City Planner wrote a letter to the City Manager asking “how do we count the 2 unrelated?”
The other major problem with their new code is that they took boarding houses out of private residential use and put them into a no-man’s land of jurisdiction. They treat us as a business use where they can regulate us by demanding entrance into our private residence whenever they see fit. They can charge us annual fees to use our residence, and they can regulate our residence in 7 ways that other group homes and rentals and regular single family households are not regulated, thus treating us with fewer rights and taking them away without just compensation.
Even small group homes are still allowed in the residential areas, but where we built our home, we are not allowed. Boarding houses are no longer allowed in R-1-A, R-1-B, or R-1-C areas. Neither are larger group homes, but small group homes, are still allowed.
We of course do not require state licensure because there are no medical professionals caring for our students of higher education. We are simply housemates sharing a home.
We have never been cited for loud parties, wrong parking, dog issues or density issues of any kind, but we have been served with three Summons and Complaints just because we have been hospitable to students of color.
We all feel this is unjust. Three of our students have been frightened away and out of Englewood because of the police harassment and the few neighbors’ overt hostility, stares, cat calls, telling us to park somewhere else, building fences so that we cannot access our alley or trash cans and then being prevented redress in any Appeals we’ve requested.
They constantly stalk us to public City meetings and court hearings. They do not qualify as “victims” but the City and they are well organized in their stalking and terrorizing of us. (We also have plenty of e-mails and detailed phone messages obtained through Open Records requests to validate this.) We are financially devastated by defending ourselves, and we are completely innocent.
Please step in and do something. We would appreciate a just law and a just application of the law. Our trial is for August 13 and 14.
Thank you sincerely,

Bill and Laura Bartnick

P.S. I apologize for forgetting to mention this very key law (below) which I amend to my letter.
I read C.R.S. 30-28-115(2). The whole statute is about equal access to residential areas. It prohibited municipalities from excluding them from any residential neighborhood.
Section 115(2)(c) provides the specific maxim. “…No municipality or county in Colorado may create regulations tantamount to eliminating these homes from any district or zone.”
People with disabilities, and people with age leaning on them, and mentally impaired residents get the same rights to enjoy the same neighborhoods as everyone else. In fact, the only permits or licenses required of these homes are the permits and licenses required by the State of Colorado to issue medications and other regulated occupations.
“Equal” means in its very definition: parallel to the standard.
If there is no standard, there is no equal.
Englewood’s new Boarding House Law Contradicts itself. See it in the Englewood Municipal Code, Title 16, Table of Uses. The City removed “boarding houses” out of Small Group Homes (Group Homes generally) and into the general “Household” category. This act instills a new conflict in their code. We cannot be a “household” according to their code because household’s are limited to two unrelated people. Boarding Houses are allowed 4 unrelated people. We are congregate living. We are a group home.

For the first time, I saw clearly that the 1999 boarding house law that existed when we built our home was not in error in any way, but was in fact in full compliance with the equal rights laws.
City license to regulate innocent relationships inside a household? It is a bizarre concept to me that we should have to 1) even know the City’s code of “family” 2) that it trumped our own private definition, and 3) it qualified the kind of people to move into town.
Please speak with Special Prosecutor Alan Katz, (from Littleton) whom Englewood had hired to prosecute us. Katz wrote his own Motion to Dismiss, and Judge Attencio dismissed it. He has some background of this case.