2021-09-07 HCHA Approved Minutes

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HCHA meeting September 7, 2021 the renter is located. If people mistakenly call the wrong center whether it's on our island or in the state, we will refer them to the correct location, we'll just do a warm hand off to the other mediation center saying this is actually is someone in your area and so again, we're working closely together, Eric and I, and we're also working closely with the other centers in the state to try to make this program as effective and beneficial to folks as possible and we're hoping that the messaging becomes even more clear on its availability and we're going to be ramping up our outreach and marketing efforts, we're waiting until October 3rd when the CDC eviction moratorium was supposed to expire to do a big push because there has been some confusing messaging so we'll be continuing to do a lot of community education around this program. And that's it for our section. If there's any questions, Eric and I will do our best to answer them. Hirota: Thanks Julie, thanks Eric. Kierkiweicz: We have some questions here. Kanealii-Kleinfelder: Thank you Chair. Quick questions for you, for anyone. Does this apply to commercial leases, businesses? Mitchell: No, this is a residential program, Act 57, specifically is for residential eviction cases for non-payment of rent so it does not apply to other types of evictions that landlords are trying to effect right now, however, we actually have a few or more, we are getting a lot of inquiries about anything related to landlord/tenant issues right now and we're trying to answer and steer people in the correct direction. If people did want to do mediation around commercial leases, we would be happy to provide those services it just wouldn't be through this program. Kanealii-Kleinfelder: Ok, thank you. That's going to start to happen more and more, lot of the funding that came to businesses has been used or wasn't predictive of a Delta variant causing multiple closures, so it would be good if you can help at all in that aspect and then I wanted to ask, what happens if a landlord does not email the notice within 15 days? Mitchell: There's a lot of things that will be left to the court to decide so we have heard sometimes from tenants that they received something and then we'll ask for their landlords contact information and try to reach out to them but sometimes it's a different kind of notice cause there's 45 -day notices, so we'll try to get as clear as possible on what the situation is and then still offer mediation services no matter what, if it's a 15 -day notice to Act 57 or if it's any other kind of landlord/tenant issue, we're still going to try to help them. Page 29 of 34