Sign Nebraska Banking Lease Template Free

Industry sign banking nebraska lease template free

we'll go ahead and get started um today is the long-awaited final webinar in our three-part series about effectively enforcing smoke-free policies um i'm sophia yelkin with lincoln lancaster county health department and tobacco-free lancaster county and we are excited to welcome you let me go ahead and introduce our featured panelists we once again have char day from the americans for non-smokers rights foundation jeff sokop with tobacco-free nebraska and susan tatum with lincoln housing authority so shar take us away thank you sophia oh it's great to be with you on this very cold day right i'm just all bundled up for it but hey before we jump into how to ensure effective compliance of your smoke-free multi-unit housing policy let's take a step back and talk about what happens before the effective date so what we want to have happen say 60 days before you go smoke free is to have all of your residents sign a lease addendum and it's really useful to notify folks in writing that they need to sign this and then schedule appointments to have them sign that lease addendum also super helpful is to post no smoking signs inside the buildings and at doorways in the entryways and any other kind of prominent place but it's really helpful to have that those signs in all the needed languages and i'd love to pass it back over to um cd i believe who has our has an example of oh shelby shelby has our example there she is um and so here at the health department we do have like door hangers that you can hang um on residence doors or at the doors to the entrance to the housing unit um the ones we have here dude does have english and then spanish on the back which is so great yeah and then we also have window clings that are available um and then if you do have needed other languages needed we would be happy to accommodate that as well there are resources we have here that's wonderful that's a great resource shelby thank you so much and we'll put maybe we can put your email address in the chat box where folks could can easily connect up with you so again these signs are awesome and here's one in spanish right there absolutely perfect so now we're talking about let me just jump in and add something real quick for those that have properties that are outside of lancaster county um just know that those same signs those same door hangers any of the window clings all the things that you see that the county health department is talking about here today are also available statewide so um if you contact shelby about that and you're in you have a property that's outside of lancaster county um she'll know to contact us and we can get those out to you for free as well so just so that you all know that that if you have those uh properties across nebraska there'll be there are research resources for you as well outside of the outside of the county i've even been sweet talked into sending them to properties out of state so just so you know that's awesome jeff thank you so much i mean what a great resource what a fabulous resource to be able to tap into uh so now we've got our date and it's the time it's time to implement our policy so this is where it's really helpful to set the stage and make it wonderful you know send a reminder to your residents a week before that the dates coming up or the day before let's say it's on valentine's day send it a week before valentine's day and then the day before and then hold some kind of coordination meeting with the staff so that everybody is well prepared for the actual date when the property goes 100 smoke-free indoors and then of course remove ashtrays remove those triggers just put them in other places and clean up littered butts because the property is going to look beautiful without all of the cigarette butts littered and then celebrate your implementation go ahead and hold a party with food music and cake any excuse for cake is a good excuse offer incentives like a grocery gift card if people want to try and quit smoking and just keep the message really positive and upbeat which then lends itself to the whole tone after the implementation date okay this is when we enforce the policy and these are those great signs that shelby showed us and this is where you know you can now advertise your smoke-free policy and listings because we know people overwhelmingly want smoke-free housing and as new residents come in you can let them know what to expect and to educate these new residents and sign smoke-free leases with them now enforcing the policy you know it's typically just one of those things that's enforced in the same manner as as other things like loud noises loud music dogs and uh you know burning toast whatever it is all the other building rules there are this policy is enforced in the same ways but susan will talk a little bit more about this and of course we know universally most people follow the rules if they understand the reasons for the policy like this is about health this is about keeping all the children and all the elderly all those with health issues healthy in in in their homes and you know talk a little bit more about the reasons for the policy and let folks know what's expected of them so that they'll see clear signage and have those triggers and reminders that'll help them comply easily with the policy and then overall just set and whole expectation of compliance and i especially like it you know to be thanked and everybody likes to be thanked for their cooperation and help so this is the time to do that when it comes to enforcement um we have this general rule of a graduated enforcement framework so the first thing is a verbal warning when you see someone smoking indoors you know they get a verbal warning and hopefully a referral to cessation for the second time that same person has has violated the policy then they get their first written warning in a cessation referral the third time maybe a second written warning and a cessation referral and the fourth time is when they get the 30-day notice of lease termination now you don't have to go buy this general framework you know do what makes best sense for your property if possible it's great to tap into sofia and her team there and add a referral to resident services or community partners for support and they can help you also develop a plan for following the policy a lease termination especially in these days and maybe jeff can talk to this too later is that least termination should only ever be the last resort now when it comes to documentation you know we want to follow through really quickly with all violation complaints and this just sets up the norm that if there are complaints people know that you're going to be taking it seriously we want to document each reported violation and here's a sample from from smoke free maine um the state of maine smoke free housing coalition you don't have to use this uh maybe uh sophia's team can help you work up a document but you really want to document evidence of each violation and then save that in your resident file and send a copy to the resident and you know make do a form that makes sense for you now what is evidence well okay we see a person it's pretty obvious isn't it we see a person smoke where they're not allowed to or we see cigarette butts in that in the the um property or used ashtrays or you smell smoke in a unit you see burn marks that would be something or smoke damage and even reports from neighbors about seeing or smelling smoke at certain times and dates we'll say a little bit more about that next but reports from your staff and observations that they see are also important so any of these could be evidence um if you if you want to make a smelling smoke as something that's not evidence then you would rely heavily on the other pieces there so more enforcement ideas are when you first go smoke free to have more frequent unit inspections for people who might be suspected of violating that policy do a knock and talk where you just chat at the doorway you don't have to physically go in and then just discuss the complaints note what you see and smell and then document that visit and send a letter after inspection that talks about the next steps and of course the consequences so the people have a clear understanding about what the consequences are now i love this because it talks about the role of the community the residents and how everybody can support this rule this policy so tell the residents how to anonymously report a complaint and maybe susan could talk about that for a minute uh residents can keep a written log of dates times location all to demonstrate this pattern and then residents can remind each other where they can go to smoke do this in a real careful gentle positive sort of way and then residents will speak up of course if they feel supported by management now after the first year it's great to consider lessons learned what you've what you've learned about this whole first year of being a smoke-free property and i really like seeing these surveys of residents after a year of this policy to get their thoughts on it and you know what they appreciated about it what would help it be more um you know accepted and then do a a little budget a little count of your cleaning costs how much money you've saved in turnover time and um how much money you've saved in maintenance too and then of course thank the residents and the celebration and have a celebration have more cake this is a great time to celebrate all that hard work you've gone through so now i'm gonna stop the share and pass it over to the amazing susan to talk about um what she'd like to share for us sure so this is the biggest piece um is the enforcement piece that i've had to deal with in my position my current position at the lincoln housing authority so i oversee um three of our senior high-rises that have been smoke-free for a number of years and so my first introduction was probably two months into my new position we got a report that we had a smoker from other residents that were smelling smoke quite often and the resident services specialist who is staff in our building had been working with this person as well and so when we do get complaints from other residents we allow them to remain anonymous we we don't let the person that we're talking to know we just let them know that we've had a complaint we don't even necessarily will say it's from a neighbor or another resident um it could be from another staff it could be from whoever but we just let them know that we have a complaint our goal really is to keep people housed i mean we're working with seniors that are low income and we you know it for my for my program and i we we really want to keep them housed but we also know um that we're looking out for the whole building in general and so um if someone is smoking in there we have to take everybody else's health and safety into consideration there so our goal when we find out someone is smoking is to have that verbal conversation with them at first and really let them know that you know this is a non-smoking unit this is where you can smoke here's the expectations um and then if we have another complaint or we suspect that there's more smoking we will go ahead and do a a written warning and then i typically i typically move on from the written warning to then if i have valid evidence that they're continuing to smoke after that we move on to a 14 30 day notice which gives them you know 14 days to get their acts together stop smoking or they'll need to leave their residence in 30 days and when we do suspect that they're smoking we pull the i think i've talked about this in the past but we pull the filter for the unit immediately after we've had that conversation with them and they've either told us they're not smoking or they're going to stop smoking so we put a new filter in and that's one way that we use for evidence i typically if it's me or my staff when we go to the door to talk to somebody first thing i typically ask is hey can i come in um and i've not yet had somebody tell me that i can't come into their unit um i i suspect that that will happen or can happen but typically i can come into their unit and i can really then smell if the smoke is in the unit or i can see if there's cigarette butts or ashtrays in there um if they deny that they're smoking i will say well do you mind if i look around then that helps me you know verify that you're not smoking and typically again they say yeah you can look around um but if they don't i mean you can base that off of documentation that you do like shar said of just making sure to document each incident a report that you have of people smelling smoke in the building when they've smelled smoke what you've done to follow up with that those types of things um what i've really noticed since we've been smoke free for a number of years in our buildings what i've really noticed is our residents that have been there a long time um they are typically pretty compliant with um the the policy what what we find is that new residents that move in that even though they've been told and we've talked about that it's smoke-free those are typically the ones that we find are the are the people that are violating the smoke-free policy and i don't know if they just didn't take it seriously when they moved in or um it just became too they thought they could do it and it became too much for them um and so that's just where that education piece comes in and i and i do notice that when the weather gets colder like it is now um although i'm gonna knock on wood right now because i haven't had any complaints lately i will have cursed myself and i will now have some complaints coming in today um but that is typically when we see colder weather or bad weather that is typically when we do potentially see um some incidents of the lease violation so and then i'll just speak really i know we want to leave some time for questions but i'll just be quickly about um the moratorium on evictions that there is going on right now um and that is really only for non-payment of rent and um we unfortunately have had to move a lease termination we did at least termination they did not move out and we had to go to for eviction in court and we we did not have a problem um with this the judge even said the moratorium's only for non-payment of rent um this is for a lease violation and so we were able to move forward with that um eviction in court so there hasn't been any any issues that we have run across yet enforcing this policy great thank you for sharing susan um jeff did you want to add anything real quick before we start taking questions one thing i'll add just real quick is is having done this a long time having worked with a lot of public housing authorities and market-based housing landlords and property managers and implementing policy um i won't say it's 100 but the vast majority the fears of enforcement are much greater than what the reality is once the once the policy goes into place um it's good to be prepared you want to know what you're going to do with if there are violations but the i think that uh it's not nearly as bad as what people think it's going to be um has been the thing that i hear most often after someone has a policy in place that doesn't mean don't be ready that does it and it also means that um people looking back and saying i'm sure glad we really took our time with it it doesn't have to be something that happens quickly take the time to educate take the time to get people ready uh and and uh that ramping up will go a long ways to having high high compliance once that policy is in place yeah okay sorry i'll just add into that once you do you know if you do end up having a violation a lease violation word spreads pretty quickly in your buildings and so sometimes when others see that that somebody did um was asked to leave or their lease was terminated it does help with complaint all right thanks for sharing that susan definitely um i think this means that we're at the point where we're able to open up the floor for questions so place your questions in the chat or if you want to take yourself off mutant ask a question go ahead and do that i have a couple that came in during registration that we'll just kind of kick off th s conversation with um one of them was are there evil any legal repercussions for violating the smoke-free policy jeff do you want to jump on that one yeah i can i can jump in on that one i i think that it's important to note that when you're setting the policy it'll be for the individual units the hallways common areas lobby laundry room you know uh community hall center whatever it might be any of those places that are that are common areas that are not private residences that are part of the residents that are inside are covered by the nebraska clean under air act so those would be violations of the of the state statute if those are going on in those in those common places so um that would be where the potential uh legal infraction would come in if there's folks that that see a violation there's ways to report that and that that inspection will take place and so um and that's also incumbent on the on the property owner themselves too to make sure that that's being followed in those in those common areas as as well and there's uh that can include putting up some signage around that as well great thank you um let's see there's another question that came in on registration um which i think you touched on char but maybe if we want to give a little bit more specific example about how you prove smoke that someone is smoking inside when they should not be i did also have a call come in with a residential complaint to the house or to the health department where the complaint was of third hand smoking is basically what the property manager ended up saying that the person would go outside and like chain smoke for 30 minutes and then come in which obviously isn't a violation but i guess could you kind of tag team how can you prove that they're smoking and then what's a way to address that if there's just that heavy residue on someone yeah let me take the the last one and probably punt the first one over to susan a little bit more but although i do have lots of examples the third hand smoke one you know sometimes it's just an education thing where people don't you know when they're around something all the time they don't really smell it anymore and yet it's really intense so um you know what would be great is if there's resident meetings to have you know to invite sofia and our team to come and to talk about third-hand smoke and what it means and what it does and and how it can can be such a dangerous thing for people and especially babies to be around in and you know so if we could just raise the education level of that that would be great something that i've done is i've talked to other smokers too and and i've asked them how do you um deal with third hand smoke you know what what do you do differently so that you don't bring all that in and they say well if here's here's the place where i stop smoking you know yards down so that i've got plenty of space to get most of the fumes off of me or and this one i love is i have a smoking jacket you know those old smoking jackets i just have a jacket that i throw on so that i don't then carry all of that third hand smoke on my clothes in and i just leave the jacket in my car or whatever it is so sometimes getting smokers to help brainstorm around that is great susan do you want to talk a little bit about how to identify issues when it comes to reporting a violation sure i don't know if i have really any good suggestions for this because if it's really not a lease violation i mean all we really can do is kind of what you suggested char is just to have a conversation with that tenant and um kind of problem solve some things with them and we do have in the buildings i oversee we do have resident meetings and so sometimes that's a time that that comes up and um you try to hold that conversation as delicately as you can so they're not trying to point fingers at a certain person during a huge meeting like that but really we just try to have one-on-one i mean there's uncomfortable conversations with our seniors that we work with that we have quite often sometimes about hygiene sometimes about you know uh cleanliness of apartments those types of things so we just try to deal with it as delicately as we can if it's not a lease violation there's not a lot you can do other than just kind of educating them and seeing if there's any assistance that you can offer them right right i would also throw in um that you know for those knock and talk kind of times that's where just like susan was saying you know and asked to be let in to take a look around if you see ashtrays full of cigarette butts there you have it or if you see a pile of cigarette butts out on the balcony or in the ground next to their their outdoor door space you know well there you have it too and sometimes we just take pictures or sometimes we just document this huge amount of litter in a certain spot and you know track it and see what happens um so there's there's a lot of different things you can do to track um these violations okay thanks for sharing that i'm going to kind of just add on um a thought from a previous webinar susan have you ever had an experience going to court for one of these um eviction or lease terminations where smoke was the only evidence like the smell of smoke and not visual evidence so i have but but i'll be honest we have i haven't had anyone yet that has shown to their court date to to fight that um charge so we have not had to present evidence but we've been prepared we've had photos of we've had the actual um filters from the unit we've had photos um from um anything that we may have found as evidence um if they've done an inspection and then it's the inspection um person that has found cigarette butts those types of things and then we've also had other residents that were willing to come in and be witnesses if need be but again fortunately we've not had to do but but we're prepared each time in case we do great thank you for sharing that's very helpful um i think we have one last question here before we wrap it up for today um but i guess it's kind of it might be a little bit big how do you tell the difference between if there's a better policy or if you should adjust your current policy do you just abandon it and get a new one do you adjust the one that you have how do you make that determination sometimes i i just check to see if if all the new things you know the tobacco industry keeps coming out with new things because they want people to be addicted so if e-cigarettes are part of your policy already then great um you know but yeah i'd love to hear what susan has to say well i i haven't had to adjust our policy yet but um what we kind of do with anything um is just kind of monitor how things are going if we feel like things are going well you know it's constant communication with staff that's working in those buildings and and at the resident meetings if residents are ha seem to be happy and satisfied with how things are going we and staff seems to be we feel pretty confident that things are going well if we start getting complaints from residents that this doesn't seem to be working or we're noticing a lot of this or that then that's when we would re-look at things and kind of sit down and have a conversation with staff and residents to see what changes we might want to implement um to satisfaction i guess at a high level great thank you oh yeah i'll add to that just a little bit as as far as uh you're going to be a good judge of of how the market's responding to it as well are you getting positive feedback from folks when they come in and uh ask about your your apartment community and and when they find out that there's no smoking allowed do they react positively or negatively or does that does that chase people away or attract uh new renters uh to your properties and so uh i think getting a feel for we know from the data as far as what people say on surveys that it's very popular that that most people want to live in a a smoke-free building um and may not always use that as a deciding point or as part of their looking but it's definitely an amenity that they that they appreciate and and enjoy for the for the most part so you may have your memory may be about that one single um um ornery salty person about the policy but it's also getting an idea of what the the entirety of the residents think of it and um and and letting the market sort of dictate to you as well that's a great point jeff thank you for sharing that um yeah so i think we're at the end of our 30 minutes i want to thank our panelists for their time these last few weeks preparing this information it's been great and we will have it available on our website and also on the anrf landing page that's dedicated for this outreach opportunity also you will be getting an evaluation email please just take a few minutes to answer it we really appreciate the feedback as we plan more programming in the future but thank you have a wonderful day and week and stay warm