Rental inspections given green light by Iowa Supreme Court

A case that has been brought up numerous times in Creston’s rental inspection process was overturned Friday by the Iowa Supreme Court.

In August 2023, The Iowa District Court for Sioux County ruled that Orange City’s rental housing ordinance violated Article 1, Section 8 of the Iowa Constitution. This section protects Iowans against “unreasonable seizures and searches” and states “no warrant shall issue but on probable cause.”

The Orange City’s rental housing ordinance requires a rental inspection before receiving a permit to rent a building out. A rental permit may be denied or revoked if the property owner has one or more units cited for violation of the ordinance or Orange City Building Code. Each permit is valid for five years, and owners have up to 30 days after the expiration of the rental permit to renew the permit.

Rental inspections in Orange City are conducted by the city’s code enforcement department, and while there is technically no fee for inspection, there is a fee for the rental permit. Orange City must notify the owner of its intent to inspect a rental unit at least 15 days in advance of the inspection date.

Inspections can not be conducted without the power or a representative of the owner present unless given prior permission. If the owner is not present, the inspection will be delayed and a $50 fee will be charged. If entry is refused, the inspector is able to seek “remedies provided by law to secure entry, including, but not limited to, obtaining an administrative search warrant to search the rental unit.”

The ordinance was first challenged in May 2021 by the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based public interest law firm. IJ say rental inspection ordinances across the country “give the government the green light to conduct blanket searches of innocent people’s homes without their consent.”

However, the Iowa Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling from August 2023 which agreed with IJ. In the court’s unanimous decision, Justice David May wrote, “Because there are situations where the city’s inspection requirement can operate constitutionally, the citizens’ facial challenge fails. The ordinance’s mandatory inspection regime can operate without violating article I, section 8.”

This decision bodes well for Creston’s rental inspection ordinance, which was passed on Jan. 2, 2024. Before the ordinance passed, numerous landlords cited the Orange City case when arguing against inspections. At the time, the council made it clear that permission must be granted before an inspector can enter a home. The city does have procedures in place in case of landlord or tenant refusal.

“If you’ve exhausted all your other options through municipal infractions and everything else, clearly there’s a pretty serious problem and a normal person isn’t going to go through all that,” Creston councilmember Martin Graham said in a May meeting. “If they don’t comply then you can go back to a judge and say, they’re not complying with anything, and then you can get the search warrant.”