Englewood Story

Link: http://www.eyeonenglewood.com

On October 22, 2007, the head of Englewood’s building department, Lance Smith, phoned me to say that the City Attorney, Dan Brotzman, had instructed him to invalidate our building permit since our contractor was no longer working on the job.

I admitted we had fired our primary contractor for breaches of contract. I explained what a struggle it had been, but the work was already finished. We were just finishing some wood trim work.

He instructed me to come down to the building department and pull a new permit. He said his department would not honor the permit previously obtained by us because it was hung on a contractor’s license, but I could obtain a homeowner’s permit.

I immediately dropped what I was doing and obeyed.

On November 7, 2007, we received a call from Tricia Langon, Senior Planner, with Community Development. She called about "several complaints" that we had "unrelated people" living with us. I told her I had written a letter of inquiry to Gary Sears and was still awaiting a reply. She said she’d call back later because she was “in the dark as to how to proceed.” One month later, December 7, 2007, she knew exactly how to proceed.

Later, upon obtaining e-mails and phone messages from this time period, I realized that she had been sending threatening Notices to other households about violating the City's definition of household for years.

What she really meant about being “in the dark” was that Mr. Sears, with other heads of staff, had been colluding together about how to prosecute a legal private residence for a City code defining, “household.”

To make themselves legally immune for this nonsense was to promulgate a lie, say: "We made a mistake, and we are correcting it now." That is all well and good for someone who doesn't have everything to lose by that lie.

In my open records from the City, I found e-mails and phone calls from the neighbors and City employees about the 'Bartnick's guest house' and 'the boarding house.' This was before I even realized what term might characterize us and defined our rights.

When Ms. Langon called next, I explained that even six weeks later,I hadn’t yet received an answer from the City Manager. All I had asked for was information, and City Manager Sears did not have the decency to converse with me. Ms. Langon replied that City Manager Sears was now ready to meet with us. December 19th would be a convenient day to discuss our options.

The hold up had been that although our select neighbors and the City Manager had already determined to force us to leave the neighborhood, they required the appearance of order to do that. They needed to "get their ducks in order" regarding the household ordinance by which to prosecute us.

I called Joe Jefferson for help. He was our District 1 Council Representative newly elected, and he relayed that in his initial interview with City Manager, Gary Sears, he had confided that the City was going to prosecute us one way or the other, and that Mr. Sears was looking into our building permits to see if they could catch us in any kind of building violation too. Joe not only spoke to me on the phone about this, but also confirmed it in an e-mail.

I wasn’t worried about the building permits because we had passed everything except the final, and I knew we had been above average in our building standards. After all, this wasn’t a fix and flip, we had personally designed it for our family’s needs. We were living in it. We were vested.

Nevertheless, when we paid for researching records at the City, we found that Manager Sears had asked Police Officer Tom Vandermee for all of my blog entries to search for something that might trigger a case against us. He also asked Lance Smith for a professional opinion as to whether there were any differences in building codes for a boarding house or a single family residence.

Even the engineer had required exterior 2’x6’ walls to provide for lower heating costs. The framer had complained about our engineer designing in extra structural support around each window and doorway. “It’s gonna be a fortress,” he’d said rolling his eyes.

But it revolted me that Mr. Sears had just arranged to meet with us “about our options,” while official plans were under way to catch us in their net. This was my turning point. As I sat there on the phone listening to Joe Jefferson, I envisioned a web the City Manager had been quietly weaving. Nausea, angst set in.

That day, December 12, 2007, a certified letter came from the City.

I panicked at this roadblock. It clearly told how they were not willing to talk about options after all, but wanted to criminalize us. The NOTICE said, “You must comply with the City's definition of household within 7 days. The City does not have any permits or variances to give you. Home occupation permits are for business, something other than the nature of the primary function of your residence, thus they do not apply to you.”

My innocent attitude turned to dismay and a feeling of utter helplessness. How could we possibly move out our flourishing South Korean at this juncture? What about our artist who had just made her room her own with linens and decor? Where would our newest guest go who had lost his job just a week after moving in? It seemed inhumane to put any of our housemates out on the street in a Colorado Winter.

I felt sick. I e-mailed the City Manager and Ms. Langon to cancel our meeting as "unnecessary" since I knew from their 7-day Notice as well as Joe's conversation that they had already made up their minds how to proceed. We had their Notice in hand.

Joe shocked me further by reporting that they might even have a police officer standing by to serve us with a complaint depending upon what I said at the meeting.

In my e-mail, I showed my revulsion like the scream of a rape victim when I named Langon and Sears as the spiders weaving their web.

December 20, 2007 I desperately wrote a letter to each City Council member instead, asking each to research the code as to variances and zoning options, and I also asked them to over-rule the City Manager since we were not criminals, but privately shared our home with students.

No one on the City Council bothered to respond. Later, I discovered, that none of them could be bothered to research their own code or to care two twitters for a common homeowner such as myself.

On December 22, Christmas week, Officer Watson stuffed a "14-Day Notice of Violation of the Definition of Household" under the doormat: Ho~Ho! Our very own Christmas present from the City had arrived.

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.