St. Petersburg City Council could vote on a proposed eviction prevention program as soon as July. On Tuesday, South St. Pete’s Citizen Advisory Council or CAC met to discuss funding the project for $100,000.

“It’s kind of a belt and suspenders, if you will,” Bradley Tennant, Assistant City Attorney for the City of St. Petersburg, said at the meeting. “Full service legal representation for tenants in the CRA (Community Redevelopment Area) who, once again, could immediately be facing eviction or looking at eviction in the future.”

An agreement is being negotiated with Community Law Program, which would provide pro-bono legal representation and information for those residents facing eviction.

The initial rollout of city-funded legal services would happen in the CRA first.

“This funding is specific for CRA residents where about 25% of our evictions come from,” Housing and Neighborhood Services Administrator Amy Foster said at the meeting. “It’s one of the highest zip codes in the county for evictions.”

Foster also said the city is considering $200,000 for eviction prevention outside the CRA in next year’s budget. Of that, $100,000 would go towards the CRA in addition to the proposed funds for this year.

“The CRA program was supposed to be the pilot, and then a city program was to start later,” Foster said at the meeting. “I think council is interested in starting something sooner. And so the timing may work out that they both run parallel to each other.”

With only four of the nine CAC members in attendance, no vote was held without a quorum. Economic Development Officer. City of St. Petersburg, noted the presentation would be for information only and to take comments to council.

Committee member Esther Matthews noted that there was no documentation about the proposal in the packets prepared for the committee members.

“There isn’t even a snippet or overview on what you are proposing to announce at city council,” Matthews said at the meeting.

Smith said they could provide committee members with a copy of the agreement and answer questions. But Matthews raised additional concerns about the current workload for the proposed law firm, Community Law Program.

“It is widely known that they are overwhelmed and overworked, how can the city administration ensure the residents that are going for this specific pocket of dollars will have access to it” Matthews asked at the meeting.

Tennant says those terms will be carefully stipulated in the agreement.

“To be clear this is not the city representing people,” Tennant said at the meeting. “We’re funding this pro-bono group to do it, and that involves a lot of very particular language related to borrower responsibilities.”

If approved, anyone who needed legal counsel in the CRA could access the program, regardless of income. That doesn’t necessarily mean their case would go to court; the legal team at CLP would make that determination based on law, along with guidelines provided by the city in the tentative agreement.

The program has been more than a year in the making, after being introduced by council member Richie Floyd in the Youth and Family Services Committee last February. The vote will go forward without CAC CRA recommendation due to the lack of quorum.

So far, Mayor Ken Welch and his administration have been supportive of the idea for the program.

Last April during discussions about tenants right to counsel, St. Petersburg City Council Vice-Chair Deborah Figgs-Sanders said, “When [landlords] know that who they’re trying to evict also has legal representation, I’m pretty sure a lot of those cases would go away.”

In previous comments, John Pollock, coordinator at the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that legal representation is like “preventative legal medicine.”

“I think it’s important to recognize that the benefits of a right to counsel accrue to the tenants and their families but also to the community and to the city at large,” Pollock added. “The cost of evictions is significant.”

Rent.com puts the average rent for apartments in St. Pete in between $1,577-$2,414. Meanwhile data from the U.S. Census says median household income in the Sunshine City is $64,375. That means that at the low end of rent, the average St. Petian is spending 29.3% of their income on rent, putting them on the edge of being rent burdened.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines rent-burdened people as those “who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing.” Those people or families often make difficult decisions between buying food and medication or paying their landlord.

“Severe rent burden is defined as paying more than 50 percent of one’s income on rent,” according to HUD.

City council could vote on the eviction prevention program as early as July 13.

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