Item 09 - Rental Registry Fee Study

Home Browse Search

Pg. 14 CHAPTER III – ALLOCATING TIME TO SERVICES City of Santa Ana Rent Stabilization Program Fee – March 2023 4. Petition Process – Section 8-3145 5. Voluntary Mediation – Section 8-3146(a) 6. Petition Hearings and Appeals – Section 8-3145(f) 7. Rental Housing Board – Section 8-3180 8. Administration (Overhead) For each of the service delivery areas above, we further identified relevant program tasks. The program tasks were created based on the ability to measure the time of work performed and estimate the number of service recipients. For instance, the Rental Registry applies to all units covered by the city’s Ordinance, while the petition process only applies to those who submit such petitions. Our list of service delivery areas and program tasks also capture 100% of the work to be performed by every staff person within the Rent Stabilization Program. Allocating Times to Tasks The following Table 4 below summarizes the times allocated to program tasks. Times are presented as per unit, per week or per year, depending on the frequency that the task is performed. Per unit times multiplied by the number of units equal the total annual time for that project task. Conversely, the annual time, divided by the number of units, gives us the time per task. Since the Rent Stabilization Program is a new endeavor for the City of Santa Ana, reasonable assumptions were made to the times required for each task. It was a collaborative effort, engaging City staff, RCS’ decades of experience in measuring workflow times, and RSG’s experience in assisting to administer the City’s Ordinance and similar programs in other jurisdictions. We referred to the City’s Rent Stabilization and Just Cause Eviction Ordinance, and reviewed other cites’ rent stabilization program annual reports to identify trends in annual services provided. The allocation of time to tasks required several reviews before everyone was comfortable with the results. The number of units per year are based on City staff’s experience within the past year, evaluation of other city’s data, and available industry standards. Where the unit per year is 1, that number represents how often that program task is performed. The base number of units covered by the City’s Ordinance is 32,450. See Appendix D – Estimated Rental Units for the details on partially and fully covered rental units. This number was identified by conducting a detailed analysis of the County of Orange tax assessor’s data, ArcGIS, existing City data, and data available through CoStar.