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# Rent Control costs and fees justified
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/rent-control-costs-and-fees-justified-editor/
- Published: 2006-06-15T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T18:21:34.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By Alan Toy Member, Santa Monica Rent Control Board*

The Rent Control Board has taken a lot of hits lately, most of them based on faulty understanding and political agendas, so I want to respond in the interest of providing some balance to the SMDP’s coverage and published letters to the editor.

Some of the letters and opinions printed have claimed that the board is bloated and that staff is overpaid. They have also implied that the board staff don’t do much to deserve their salaries and benefits. Neither is true.

The salaries of the Rent Control Board employees are comparable to — and in many cases lower — than other Santa Monica City employees with analogous positions and with similar seniority. In fact, our legal staff are paid considerably less than the City Attorney’s staff on average. Our general counsel’s salary is almost $40,000 less than the high range of deputy city attorneys’ salaries and our counsel is responsible for a wide range of legal areas, not just a narrow specialization that the deputy city attorneys’ job descriptions cover.

Our senior administrator is one of the finest administrators in this or any other city. Her highly competent staff and attorneys have protected rent control against a series of attacks over almost three decades. They have fought for tenants’ rights in courtrooms all the way up to the Supreme Court and back several times. In the vast majority of the cases, the tenants of Santa Monica have been extremely lucky that our fine attorneys are far more competent in the courts than the attorneys of those who would happily eliminate rent control in order to maximize the profits they think they have been cheated out of for 25 years.

The $11 registration fee has been in place for 13 years.Meanwhile,to keep within its budget and to respond to changing workload demands, the board has downsized its staffing over the past several years. In 2003/2004, the agency had 30.5 positions. In 2004/2005 there were 29.40 positions, in 2005/2006 28.80 positions, and in 2006/2007, the agency has budgeted 27.80 positions. The board itself discusses at length every new contract for each of our employee groups.All of our decisions are included in the public record. We have, in my tenure, negotiated downward almost every first contract proposal we have been given. Why? Well, in large part because we didn’t want to raise the registration fees. It certainly wasn’t because we weren’t happy with the work our terrific staff perform day in and day out. They are some of the most dedicated and professional people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. By the way, there is a 9/80 working schedule for all City Hall employees, not just the Rent Control Board. This means people work longer days in order to have every other Friday off. The benefits of this kind of arrangement for the city and for the employees are far too numerous to go into in this letter.

We on the board are all aware that the decisions to raise rents by 4 percent, raise the registration fees $2 a month and add an extra energy charge for renters in master-metered apartment buildings are going to be hard for some Santa Monica residents. In order to meet our legal mandates, we have to allow reasonable rent increases which roughly match the inflationary factors that are relevant to the housing industry. The rising costs of gas and energy alone account for 25 percent of this year’s general rent increase. Four percent is not one of the highest rate increases we have ever given, but it is painful, nevertheless. Being on the board is kind of like being between a rock and a hard place. It is pretty thankless. But I am grateful for having had two terms to help keep a lid on the not so attractively changing face of our still-lovely city.

The real pain for me however, is in seeing the kinds of skyrocketing rents charged by landlords when vacancies occur. That is the reason that affordable housing is rapidly disappearing from Santa Monica, not the $2 regulation fee increase, or the 4 percent adjustment.Without this excellent group of agency employees, rent control would have been beaten back or eliminated years ago and all of us would be at the mercy of the free market whims of property owners in a desirable beachside community. The threat to Santa Monica’s renters was good reason to create rent control in 1979 and it remains just as reasonable and necessary in today’s rampantly out-of-control real estate market. Without it, any hope of maintaining demographic diversity in our city will be lost forever.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 15, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/061506.pdf?ref=smdp.com)