Rumbaugh’s plan to gut Tacoma’s Tenant Bill of Rights is a betrayal | Opinion

Just two years ago, Tacoma voters made their voices heard at the ballot box. By passing the Tenant Bill of Rights, officially the Landlord Fairness Code (LFC), we enacted some of the strongest renter protections in Washington state. It was a clear mandate to bring stability to our communities and protect our city’s 100,000 tenants from the worst excesses of a brutal housing market.

Now Sarah Rumbaugh, a landlord and my City Council Member, is proposing to rip these protections to shreds.

On Oct. 23, Rumbaugh revealed a sweeping set of proposals that read like a wish list from the Rental Housing Association, the powerful right-wing landlord lobby. If approved, her plan would not just tweak the law; it would fundamentally gut its core pillars, transforming a universal policy that protects all tenants into a bureaucratic maze that benefits only a tiny fraction.

This is a full-scale attack on the will of Tacoma voters, rushed through without tenants at the table and before a newly elected mayor and city council are seated in January.

The LFC has been a clear success. For the past two years, as Tacoma for All canvassed thousands of tenants, we heard a consistent story: rent hikes are finally being kept in check, most under 5%. Why? Often because the LFC requires landlords to offer relocation assistance for rent increases over 5%. We’ve seen firsthand how this works. When landlords try to issue a massive hike, tenants simply request the assistance they are owed, and landlords almost universally choose to lower the rent instead.

This simple, universal mechanism has given tenants real leverage and brought desperately needed stability. That stability is now under threat.

Rumbaugh’s written proposal includes means-testing for one of the LFC’s central pillars: eviction protections. Alarmingly, at the same Oct. 23 meeting and previously, the suggestion was verbally raised to gut a second pillar: relocation assistance. Just like Trump’s tactic of adding bureaucratic hurdles to Medicaid is designed to drive millions of eligible people out of their benefits, forcing tenants to prove their income will prevent the vast majority from ever accessing their rights.

The most insidious part of this plan, however, is how it would transform the way our courts handle cold-weather evictions. For the last two years, our courts have barred economic evictions (for late rent) during the coldest months, from Nov. 1 to April 1. This automatic, universal protection has been a lifeline, giving families facing a job loss or medical emergency a few months to get back on their feet.

Rumbaugh’s plan would upend that entirely. The moratorium would no longer be automatic. Instead, every single cold-weather eviction would proceed unless the individual tenant contests it, proves their income and gets the legal support required to argue their case. It transforms a right into a legal battle most tenants cannot win. To add insult to injury, the plan also proposes cutting the protection from five months to three and considers eliminating school-year eviction protections for families with children.

Similarly, if relocation assistance is repealed or means-tested, it would end tenants’ leverage which has helped stabilize rents for everyone. It would be a green light for the return of excessive, double-digit rent hikes, guaranteeing more mass displacement of working-class Tacomans.

The hypocrisy of this “means-testing” is exposed by the plan’s other proposals. While claiming to target protections to the lowest-income tenants, Rumbaugh simultaneously calls for exempting landlords of “deed-restricted affordable housing” from the law entirely. We have canvassed these properties; some are non-profits, but many are run by outside corporate slumlords who cash in on federal tax credits while tenants face deplorable conditions. Rumbaugh’s means-testing would limit rights to low-income tenants, then exempt the very landlords who house them. We are open to exemptions for some public and non-profit landlords from certain LFC provisions, but we should not be exempting outside slumlord investors whose tenants most need protection.

The plan is peppered with other attacks to nickel-and-dime tenants: raising late fees from $10 to $75, repealing the cap on move-in fees, and shortening the notice required for rent hikes. When half of Tacoma’s tenants are rent-burdened, these are not minor tweaks; they will push more families over the edge.

This is not a good-faith effort to improve a law. It is a race to the bottom, rooted in the false logic that we must deny tenants their rights to attract investment.

This council must not be allowed to lock in the landlord lobby’s agenda. As a broad coalition of 36 labor, faith, and community leaders articulated in an Oct. 8 op-ed in The News Tribune, we call on the City Council to “reject this sprint ... allow the next administration to tackle these issues with a fresh mandate from the people ... [and] facilitate a genuine negotiation between stakeholders — tenants, landlords and affordable housing providers.”

The City Council must honor the will of the voters. They must reject these rollbacks and let the new, duly-elected council address this issue with tenants, not lobbyists, at the table.

Tyron Moore is the co-executive director of Tacoma for All, the organization that ran the 2023 Tenant Bill of Rights ballot initiative.

This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 3:00 AM.