Allison Kreger rented a dwelling near downtown Woodstock starting in 2016 and said she adored the city.

She left in 2017 after encountering problems with her apartment, including a plumbing issue that left water pooling in the property’s basement that took a long time and a report to local government to get resolved, Kreger said. She left over the issues and now is living back in her native Ontario, Canada, after staying for a short stint at another home in Wonder Lake, Kreger said.

She lost about $1,500 in the form of a security deposit, saying she never expected to get any of it back.

“We would go to D.C. Cobbs, we went to the movie theater there. I worked there in town. I really loved Woodstock. I could have seen myself being there forever,” Kreger said.

Kreger’s experience as a renter in Woodstock, and her decision to leave town over her dealings with her landlord, is an example at least one city official points to as a reason to push forward an ordinance aimed at preventing more current and future renters from having similar problems. Woodstock officials are drafting a proposal the City Council could use to enact new regulations on landlords over the coming months.

“It reflects badly on the city. We have residents who want to come to Woodstock and live in Woodstock. And they’re subjected to that and they don’t want to stay. We want our housing stock to be of a better quality,” Woodstock Building and Zoning Director Joe Napolitano said in an interview.

City officials are drafting a plan that would require landlords found to be problematic property owners whose rentals are repeatedly cited for violating local laws to register with the city.

The city is considering requiring landlords to register if they are cited for three violations at a single rental property within a six month period that all go unresolved within the timeframes given by the city to correct the issues. Registration also would be required for property owners found to be leasing an unauthorized dwelling. Landlords caught in such situations would be forced to give their names and contact information to the city.

For landlords who refuse to register their property within 30 days and put their contact information on file with the city in the event their rentals are caught with a series of infractions that get ignored, the city would issue a $250 fine. At the 60-day mark without registration, the city would issue a $500 fine, and then a $750 fine could be issued at the 120-day mark. The city would take a landlord to court in the event the 120-day mark is reached without a registration when a landlord is required to provide it.

Landlords hit with enough citations to trigger the proposed regulations would then be required to register all properties under their ownership within 30 days of notification. After registering, should a “chronic nuisance,” defined as three violations within six months, occur more than once within a one-year period, the city would require annual inspections of all properties owned by the violator for three years, until they are deemed free from violations.

This is not the first time Woodstock officials have heard a call for stronger tenant protections against landlords.

In 2017, landlords ran a successful campaign that defeated a proposal that would have had all landlords in Woodstock register their contact information with the city. Landlords with one to 10 units would have had to pay $15 for their initial registration, a landlord with 11 to 20 units would pay $30 and a landlord with more than 20 units would pay $50, according to the past proposal.

A similar push back already is being made on the revived, less stringent proposal.

The city has seen the return of campaign signs last used in the 2017 debate that have popped up in front of dozens of Woodstock homes and incorrectly suggest landlords or tenants could be taxed in some way by the new regulations city officials are drafting and may approve this year.

No such tax on the table.

Kreger’s former landlord, Mary Brown, said she opposes the registration plan.

Brown, who has long run real estate management companies with various names that maintained rental units in Woodstock, has been at the center of complaints tenants have made to city officials over at least eight years.

Earlier this year, Alice Wilson and her boyfriend Randy Ingram were renting a home on Jackson Street in Woodstock that was managed by a company Brown led, and said they went through delays with getting a stove repaired that had burners not working, and said they found a squirrel living within the home’s wall behind the stove.

Brown said she received no report of a squirrel living in the home. And she denied that there was any standing water in Kreger’s rental, while saying Kreger’s repair requests were addressed with the appropriate priority, and balanced with the repair needs of other renters.

She said in regards to Kreger’s experience that “water pooling in a common area basement is not water pooling in the rental unit.”

She said the waste pipe on the property Kreger rented gets clogged with mostly grease, and she reminds tenants not to put any grease down drains.

“We have it rodded and life goes on,” Brown said.

“What was extremely urgent to her may not have been extremely urgent to the operations people who handled real emergencies along with non-urgent repair requests every day,” Brown said of Kreger. “From our records, it looked like a good job was done answering phone calls and emails from this tenant and the repair work orders were completed.”

She said one of Wilson and Ingram’s stove burners was not working, and that Ingram left the apartment the day before rent was due and their apartment was left damaged. Wilson disputes they caused damage.

She and Ingram broke their lease by moving out early and found a new place to rent in Crystal Lake. They think some more local regulation of landlords would help renters stay in Woodstock longer.

“Something needs to be done,” Wilson said.

In 2013, Brown was brought up at a City Council meeting for being an unfair landlord by a group of current or former renters in the city who spoke to elected officials at the meeting. The group included some who said their homes went more than two weeks without power over the holidays without their landlord helping to fix the issue and others who said they had a leaking water heater and mold growing on their walls among other health and building codes that they said were were flagged by local officials.

Since 2017, records show, Brown has had several cases filed against her in McHenry County Court over small claims about unreturned security deposits on rental units, with defendants in multiple cases winning back hundreds of dollars. In one case, Brown was ordered to pay $9,000 in a dispute that started over just more than $1,100 in a partial security deposit, records show.

Brown in emails acknowledged receiving a citation from the city earlier this year for local code violations at a Jackson Street property she rents. She challenged, however, the veracity of the report the citation stemmed from, and alleged that a city official misstated on the report when he entered the property and observed the issues.

Brown said she was cited in relation to a maintenance code that requires vacant land and buildings to be “kept in a clean, safe, secure and sanitary condition.” Brown said she received the citation in early May and was given until May 30 to fix the issue or face potential penalties of $50 to $750 each day.

She said some city officials ”still operate under the rules of the ‘old boys club’ and if you’re a girl, well, you just don’t get into the ‘clubhouse.’”

“Forcing a new registration rule on a select few is punitive and discriminatory. Is it even legal? A better idea would be to save the tax money that would be spent on this and use it to upgrade the level of professionalism in the Woodstock Code Enforcement and Building Departments,” she said.

Napolitano, the city building and zoning director, said in response to Brown that all complaints about city staff are investigated, and “appropriate action is taken.” Napolitano also pointed to Brown’s history with city regulators.

“Ms. Brown and her company, Advantage Plus, have been involved in numerous code enforcement violations and we have received a number of complaints from her tenants,” Napolitano said.

City officials said the regulations under consideration are not aimed at one person in particular. Officials anticipate only a few landlords, likely less than 1%, might rack up enough local code violations in a short enough time to be required to register through the new possible law, which would be called the Performance-Based Property Improvement Program.

Woodstock has about 10,000 dwellings and 40% of its housing is classified as rental, with probably more than 2,000 different landlords, according to city officials. But about 60% of the complaints to the city about property issues like overgrown grass, lack of heat or water, garbage or rubbish and inoperable vehicles on properties, are in regards to rentals, Napolitano said.

Out of the complaints that are about rental properties, many of them come to the city from tenants themselves, Napolitano said, but the city doesn’t always ask the complainant their relation to the property and sometimes they choose to stay anonymous. He said there are a couple times each winter that renters in the city end up without a working heating system in their homes and the city hears about it after the tenants have tried contacting their landlords.

From 2017 to 2019, city code enforcement recorded about 600 local code violations per year, on average, Napolitano said, and issued about 25 tickets a year requiring the property owner to appear in a city court proceeding. The city only takes violations to court that do not get addressed within the timeframes given by an officer, and Napolitano said the city is flexible when property owners ask for more time to fix something after being given an initial citation.

“Our intention is for landlords to do business with honor in Woodstock,” said Woodstock City Council member Wendy Piersall, a proponent of the additional rules. “This is not for people who have one-off violations.”

Hearing the statistics saddened Nick Gray, a landlord who has rentals in Woodstock and Wonder Lake.

“It breaks my heart there are that many people that would run a low standard on their rentals. I have one renter that has been with me for 36 years. That’s the standard I go to: If they need a new bathroom floor, let’s put a whole new bathroom in. It protects my investment, too,” Gray said.

But he said he still would be cautious about supporting the potential new Performance-Based Property Improvement Program, arguing, like other landlords interviewed for this story, that the city already has the tools it needs to ensure the health and safety of tenants, and that the exterior of properties do not become too unsightly.

That perspective was shared by Gary Lechner, a landlord who said he owns and rents “a lot” of homes in Woodstock and was a vocal opponent of the 2017 attempt at landlord registration in the city, and also was behind the recent return of some of the “No Tenant Tax” campaign signs.

“Quite frankly, the city has the ability on the books to take care of people like that,” Lechner said of landlords whose properties are frequent violators of local codes.

Woodstock officials, at the direction of the City Council, vowed earlier this year to step up their aggressiveness on local property code enforcement throughout the city, for both renter-occupied and owner-occupied homes, by setting shorter deadlines to get violations fixed before court appearances are required and fines start to get issued.

But Lechner worries the registration program, if enacted, could be expanded by future elected leaders to mandate landlords perform more maintenance and improvements of their properties than is necessary, and than they can afford without raising the costs of rents.

He said he is skeptical the city has much difficulty tracking down a human who can help fix a problem when local code violations or a public safety matter like a crime or a fire occur in a rental home owned by a limited liability company or other business entity.

But Napolitano said sometimes communication does not move as fast as officials would like when dealing with representatives of out-of-state parties and business entities that own and operate rental housing in Woodstock, and that is one reason they think the registration requirement for frequent violators could be useful.

No fees are proposed to be charged to participants in either the city’s current voluntary registration program or those landlords required to participate in the proposed Performance-Based Property Improvement Program, unless they avoid registering when legally obligated to do so.

“A lot of the properties are these landlords’ retirements. The value of the house is really these peoples’ retirement asset,” Lechner said. “The city has huge power. Why would you waste your time trying to set up this program and then come around telling everybody it’s going to be free? It’s not going to be free forever.”