As the city of Greenwood’s legal fight continues to forcibly vacate a troubled hotel, officials say they plan to review the city’s hotel ordinance.
City officials are suing the owners of the Red Carpet Inn and Fanta Suites in civil court in order to force compliance with previous orders to vacate. Because employees making repairs to the hotel continue to occupy the hotel, city attorneys argued during a preliminary injunction hearing last week that the hotel’s owner is violating the plan commission order to vacate the property.
While a decision on whether the city can force the employees out has not yet been made, the years-long focus on the hotel’s issues does have officials considering a review of the city’s hotel ordinance.
Current ordinance
The 2019 hotel ordinance resulted from concerns raised about the number of calls police and firefighters responded to at hotels near the Interstate 65 and Main Street interchange. It requires that all places of lodging have a city license, and outlines procedures for probation and revoking the license for those that have a high number of calls for police, fire, code and health department violations.
If a hotel has twice the number of calls for service as it does guest rooms within a one-year period, it would be placed on probation. Calls for service are the total number of calls to law enforcement or the fire department in a one-year period where the calls allege evidence of criminal activity, result in an arrest, charge or citation, or find an imminent threat to the “safety of persons and properties.” It also includes calls made to the code enforcement or the city’s Department of Community Development Services that result in a citation, according to city documents.
During the probationary period, the business owners are expected to take action to mitigate the problems and meet with city officials regularly to discuss the issues. City officials would not tell them how to operate their business but would tell them in what areas changes are needed, according to city documents.
If the call ratio does not decrease to less than 1.5 times the number of guest rooms after six months of probation, the city could revoke a hotel’s license and force it to close. The license could also be revoked if the calls for service ratio is at or above twice the number of guest rooms for any one-year period after the hotel enters the probationary period, city documents say.
As the spotlight turned to the Red Carpet Inn and the number of calls for service over the last 1.5 years, officials were unable to use the ordinance to force the hotel to close.
‘Set too high’
Three months ago, the hotel had 83 rooms reported in service, meaning that if it has at least 166 calls for service related to a criminal offense within a one-year period, it would be placed on probation. As of mid-September, Greenwood police have responded to 67 criminal offenses, mostly narcotics-related, at the hotel, Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison said earlier this year.
If only police and fire calls were considered, the hotel could have been found in violation of the ordinance. However, the calls have to be related to a criminal offense in order to be considered in violation of the ordinance, Ison said.
“The ratio, in my opinion, is set too high,” he said in September. “… When that ordinance was made, that threshold was set way too high for us to be able to have any piece to be able to enforce it.”
At that time, city officials form the police department, city council and mayor’s office said they were working on changing the ordinance. Mayor Mark Myers said at the time that the city was going to move forward with some sort of action, though he was unsure what it would be.
Myers expects the city’s review of the ordinance to begin sometime after the new year.
“After the first of the year, we’ll be back up to full staffing in our legal department, and then we’ll have time to have somebody sit down, study the law on that and look at what possible changes can be made,” Myers said earlier this month.
The review is expected to be a holistic review of the entire ordinance. Changes to the call ratio is one thing Myers would like to see change, depending on legal review, he said.
“We’re making so many runs to these places, but the ratio was not making it enough to be a nuisance,” Myers said “Yet, we compare that to other areas that are just as heavily populated, and we have hardly any calls to those areas.”
For example, The Verge — which has 200 apartments — had only had 31 runs by early December, compared to The Red Carpet Inn’s 160 or so by early December, police data shows.
At the time of the ordinance’s original passage in 2019, city council member Linda Gibson was the lone no vote. She voted against the ordinance at the time because she believed the ratio was off, she said earlier this month.
“There’s no way that that ratio is attainable,” Gibson said.
She is for the ordinance but said the ratio makes it impossible to enforce.
“If we really want that to work, we’ve got to change the ratio on it,” she said.
Changes could be in store in the future, but it will have to be after the situation with Red Carpet Inn is resolved, she said.
By that point, city officials will know what needs to be changed and how to do it, Gibson said. Doing all the modifications at once is better than doing piecemeal fixes, she said.
“In my opinion, it’s better to get on down the road, and then we’ve got the background and the insight to know what changes we need to make,” Gibson said.
The city council will have the final say on the ordinance.
