A new ordinance to enforce a 30-day limit for stays at hotels and motels approved at Tuesday’s Portage City Council meeting spurred a discussion of helping people who need longer stays.
“Currently, we have people living long-term in the hotels. That’s not what they’re designed for,” Fire Chief Chris Crail said.
“I know in my house, I accumulate a lot of things,” and the same could happen during a lengthy hotel stay, Crail said. Hotels and motels aren’t designed for long-term living, he said. Extended-stay hotels are the exception.
Motels and hotels aren’t designed for hot plates and other devices for heating food, Crail said. Using those items in a normal motel is a fire safety hazard.
“The legal basis is from a health and safety standpoint,” council attorney Scott McClure said. “This is an attempt to make sure that if we have it long-term, we address those long-term” stays and make sure the buildings are used for what they’re designed for.
Guests can stay at a hotel for longer than 30 days, but they would have to move to a different room, Mayor Austin Bonta said. The new ordinance gives the city’s Board of Works the authority to make exceptions when hotel occupancy is so high, there isn’t another room available.
“We’re making sure our hotels are operating as hotels,” Bonta said. There are 13 currently located in the city.
Each hotel has to maintain a guest register that the fire department, building department and police can inspect at any time, Crail said. If a guest is there longer than 30 days, enforcement would mean fining the hotel, not evicting the guest.
Forcing the guest to move to a different room allows the hotel staff to check for use of a hot plate or other violations, Bonta said.
The 30-day limit prompted a discussion with residents at the meeting about how to help people going through hardship.
Bonta said he would love to work toward finding help for people in that situation. The new ordinance offers a tool to help identify them.
It also helps identify people who might be using a motel room for criminal purposes.
The ordinance allows a more robust relationship between the city and its hotels, Bonta said.
“It’s primarily an ordinance for fire safety,” he stressed, but other positive outcomes could occur.
“The human component is real,” McClure said, but the ordinance deals with health and safety to ensure people in hardship are staying somewhere that is safe.
If people regularly stay longer than 30 days, the hotel could make modifications to become an extended-stay hotel.
“The last thing we want is for them to be in an unsafe hotel,” Bonta said. “Safety is primary.”
Police Chief Michael Candiano said the department’s new social worker could help individuals who need support from social services. “She’s already worked several hundred cases. She’s always available to other city departments,” he said.
“These people are paying $2,400, $2,500 to stay there. It seems like there would be some place cheaper, to be honest,” Candiano said.
But perhaps there’s a reason people staying at a motel can’t move to stable housing, a resident said. They might not be able to save enough for the move because they’re paying so much for the motel. Or they might have lost their identification. “There’s a lot of obstacles to folks to get into stable housing,” she said.
Then there’s the shortage of affordable housing in Porter County.
“The goal is not to make it impossible if someone is in that situation,” Bonta said, but to ensure safety. “We have found some tragic things happening in hotels.”
“The goal is to set up things where we can be checking things before it becomes a tragic thing,” he said.
“We want it to be a safe place to stay, not only for people who are having housing issues but also people who are traveling,” Candiano said.
One resident said she lived at the Hampton Inn for four months straight when her home was uninhabitable because of a disaster. She has had homeless relatives live at motels, too, offering to help staff the motel to pay for their stay.
“I got the nickname hall monitor because I was on the second floor and I heard everything,” she said, including people entering the motel who weren’t registered there.
“The goal is not to punish anyone who is a guest. The goal is to hold hotels accountable,” Bonta said. “Without this ordinance, we don’t have a starting point to get this addressed.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.