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STEUBENVILLE -- City officials are still pondering how a federal judge's ruling in a Bowling Green lawsuit filed over restrictions to the number of unrelated individuals living in a rental unit will impact a similar ordinance in Steubenville.
Like Steubenville, Bowling Green's council had enacted the regulation in an effort to reduce so-called nuisance issues associated with student housing, including things like code violations, lack of parking and loud parties.
Bowling Green banned more than three unrelated individuals from sharing a single rental unit.
Steubenville's regulation, which stipulates no more than two unrelated individuals may share a single rental property, was enacted in response to complaints from other property owners.
Three tenants, later joined by more than 20 Bowling Green landlords, filed the suit in federal court for the Northern District of Ohio over the ordinance. The complaint, filed in November 2017, claims the city told the three unrelated tenants, members of a fraternity, they had to move or risk being charged with a misdemeanor and fined $500 a day.
Earlier this year, however, U.S. District Magistrate James R. Knepp deemed Bowling Green's regulation to be "impermissibly arbitrary" and oppressive, saying that city's restriction "only focuses on the type of relationship between those living together in a home."
Knepp said at the time Bowling Green's ordinance "fails to substantially advance the avowed government interests of reducing population density or targeting specific issues with college-aged inhabitants, and treats similarly-situated homeowners and tenants differently without any justifiable basis."
Urban Projects Director Chris Petrossi declined comment, referring questions to Steubenville Law Director Costa Mastros. Mastros was not available to comment, however.
But, in his monthly report to the planning commission, Petrossi had pointed out it's difficult to enforce the ordinance "because in order to do so, we must know the makeup of the group occupying the dwelling unit."
"Our current procedure when we receive a complaint is to visit the residence, knock on the door and when a resident answers, we tell them who we are, why we are there and interview them by asking questions about (them) and their relationship … to determine if a violation exists," Petrossi noted in that report. "In many cases, after repeated visits no one answers the door therefore we cannot determine that a violation exists."
Petrossi said a committee organized to discuss Steubenville's college student housing problems had met in February, before Knepp's ruling, "and the consensus was to examine how such housing could be regulated via the conditional use procedures already in place."
"I am therefore working on a draft proposal that the committee will review at a later date," he said in the report.