There’s an interesting story in today’s paper about the need to constitute a Rent Tribunal in Anguilla. This was stated by a senior magistrate on the island during the opening of a rent commissioners training workshop.
The news brings to mind St. Maarten’s Rent Committee, of which the functioning – or rather non-functioning – has been questioned on many occasions over the past decade. This resulted in court cases starting at the end of 2010 in which government was held liable for possible consequences.
Then-Member of Parliament (MP) Jules James at the time said he would table legislation to fix the problem. The matter came up in the legislature again a year later during a meeting on changes to the Civil Code concerning property rental and related topics that included raising the maximum real estate value under the committee’s scope from NAf. 130,000 to NAf. 250,000 for both the land and structure, whereby an even higher ceiling of NAf. 400,000 for the building alone was suggested.
In April 2015 the court stated that all the Rent Committee’s decisions since 10-10-10 might be “voidable” because its members had not been appointed via national decree as required from that date. By doing so retroactively the Council of Ministers remedied this situation in June, with the Governor issuing the decree in August and the Minister of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment and Infrastructure VROMI signing off on the document in September.
Despite that move, less than two months later a judge annulled the committee’s decision allowing Water’s Edge Development (WED) permission to end its rental agreement with – now no longer existent – Lee’s Roadside Grill effective May 31, 2016. Ultimately the committee was anyhow unauthorised in this case because the dispute did not regard housing but a place of business.
In January 2018 the Ombudsman announced a systematic investigation of the Rent Committee. The annual budget to execute its task adequately, daily operations, accessibility to the public, application of the law and particularly assisting people to properly file their petitions as well as impediments resulting in excessive complaints at the Ombudsman Bureau were among the details to be looked at.
The exact outcome of that exercise is not yet clear, but preliminary findings were that the committee was ill-equipped to handle the increased number of clients following the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma, while a formal request to improve the working conditions made in the first quarter of 2017 had been ignored by General Affairs. Hopefully, efforts have since been made to fully address this long-standing issue and help restore some much-needed order when it comes to renting living accommodations, in the interest of both landlords and tenants.
