The Palm Springs City Council Thursday will consider extending the city’s two-week eviction moratorium until June 4 for non-payment of rent due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The eviction ban applies to certain residential and commercial tenants, and give those tenants 120 days to pay back the rent due.
“This situation is unprecedented and the circumstances are changing hourly,” City Attorney Jeff Ballinger wrote in a staff report. “The situation is evolving so rapidly that it is hard to capture the full scale of the business and employment closures.”
Evictions ordered by state, federal or local government agencies for reasons of “public health or safety, severe public nuisance, or necessitated by the COVID-19 emergency” would still be allowed.
The move comes as Californians statewide face economic uncertainty amid the stay-at-home order issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which followed the city’s own shelter-in-place order in place the past two weeks that shuttered many local businesses, and effectively canceled the local tourism season.
Council members passed the original ban, which is scheduled to sunset Thursday, on March 19.
Under the ordinance as written, tenants would have 120 days to pay their landlords back rent. In contrast, Cathedral City, which enacted a similar ordinance last week, gives tenants 60 days.
Tenants would also be required to pay “whatever amount of rent the tenant can” based on the individual tenants’ wage losses.
Under the proposed rules, tenants would need to notify the landlord in writing of any lost income contributing to their inability to pay rent and must provide proof.
The staff report attached to the agenda item for Thursday’s meeting appears to have been written before the governor’s latest executive order that also barred some evictions — which built on his previous order that temporarily lifted state laws to allow for local governments to put the brakes on evictions themselves — making it unclear how the final ordinance may read.
Newsom signed an executive order with language similar to the city’s ordinance on Friday that temporary halted some evictions statewide through May, drawing the ire of tenants activists and several state lawmakers who said the order didn’t go far enough to protect tenants.
Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said the language of the order still allows for landlords to terminate leases and evict a renter who fails to pay after the moratorium is lifted.
“Unfortunately, the new executive order on evictions doesn’t protect renters from eviction,” Wiener tweeted. “Instead, it delays the evictions. It allows landlords to evict renters on paper & then enforce the eviction post-emergency. That isn’t enough.”