We Get Letters: Pasadena Rental Housing Department Budget Report is Misleading and Raises Questions

In your article on April 30th (“Pasadena Rental Housing Department Underspends Budget by 45%”), you cite a report that was delivered to the Pasadena Rental Housing Board on Thursday, May 1st. This report states that the Rent Stabilization Department spent $2,600,000 in the first 3 quarters of the fiscal year through June 2025.

Any one smart would ask…What are they spending all this money doing? But there is more.  They actually spent MORE!!

This $2,600,000 is misleading since the report completely misses several important issues:

• The Rent Stabilization Department staff commented in the Rent Board meeting of April 17th that the reported spending excludes major items that have not been billed, such as the full cost of the rental registry implementation by 3Di. Any claim of underspending the budget should be treated highly skeptically.

• The income from housing provider rent registry fees is still far below the estimated plan. The claimed number of apartments in Pasadena has shrunk.  The alleged rental housing units have decreased from the 37,497 stated by the Rent Board’s consultants in 2023, to 27,407 today. Even now, after 2 years of work, the Rent Board cannot substantiate that number. We don’t know whether income is low because of noncompliance by landlords, or because of the fundamental miscalculations by the Rent Board’s consultants and staff.

• The report completely fails to mention that the rent registry fee of $215 per unit is supposed to cover not just this year’s spending, but LAST year’s expenditure of $1,550,000.  There is no acknowledgement of this debt to Pasadena’s taxpayers and no plan to repay it of which we are aware.

Overall, this weekly report to the Rent Board evades the full story, and completely ignores its taxpayer-funded budget hole  while they continue spending other people’s money that does not improve the rental housing situation by any measure.

Ann-Marie Villicana