Battles between former mayors are not uncommon. But typically those disputes involve politics or personalities. It’s not often they also involve unpaid rent and legal filings.
But that’s the story from the city of Hawthorne, where two former mayors are locked in a legal dispute over back rent and housing conditions. Apparently, being elected mayor of a city doesn’t protect you from living in an aelleged dump. It also doesn’t exempt you from having to pay your rent.
The mayor of Hawthorne could be forced to pay upwards of $11,000 in a landlord-tenant dispute over a condominium he claims was plagued with problems and infested with roaches, according to a Superior Court judge ruling.
Mayor Chris Brown has been so impacted by his experience that he says he is considering a tenant’s bill of rights to the city council. His landlord says Brown, who was elected mayor in November, stopped paying rent several months before an eviction notice was issued.
"After a couple months, I finally wrote him a letter that said, 'Dear Mayor, how about bringing in the rent?'" said Hocker, who served as mayor of Hawthorne himself from 1976 to 1985, in an interview with NBC news.
Last week, Brown was ordered to pay several months worth of the $2,200 rent to his former landlord.
Brown said he made 15 to 20 complaints without any response from Hocker.
"Plumbing issues, only one working bathroom out of three bathrooms, the downstairs bathroom. Rodents, roaches, it was just infested, it was a sad case. There was no way I could live there under those conditions," Brown said in an interview from his new residence, which he now rents a few miles away from his previous condo unit.