Shifting blame

May 09, 2008 05:22 am

— After "years of debate and worry," according to The Daily Item editorial page, Sunbury has "reached a crossroads" in its struggle to cope with the number of rundown rental units (read the number of unwanted human elements) in the municipality. After watching this farce progress in the local news for months now, I feel it's time to speak up for some of the rental property owners that the city is trying to make responsible for its lack of good government policy and enforcement.
Picking on landlords and blaming all the problems from the "unwanted" elements on them is naive at best and disingenuous at worst. We all want Sunbury to be a better, cleaner and safer place to live but the answer is certainly not making property owners do criminal background checks on potential renters. I'm having a hard time even believing that the city fathers have even proposed such a dunder-headed idea and expect us all to just sit back and accept this. What's next? Should we make landlords look into the backgrounds of renters' relatives? Should we make those who rent units ask potential tenants what race they belong to? And when someone who has perhaps paid their debt to society is then denied an apartment, who picks up the legal bill when the rejected tenant decides to sue? The city government, the police, The Daily Item?
What the local government and this newspaper propose is to make the landlords the eyes and ears of Big Brother. What I think is that this city has now come up with a way to replace the very unpopular $100 business tax with a new tax on rental property owners. The city leaders can now go back to their favorite barber shops in town, get a haircut and have the landlords pay for it. What The Daily Item fails to realize is that the "en masse" turnout at a recent public meeting had little to do with property values and everything to do with the less than desirable elements moving into this area. Instead of blaming the landlords, let's blame the fact that Sunbury is the county seat and how easy it is to get public assistance. Let government fix the loopholes and not shift blame.
Tom Charvat
Selinsgrove