A group advocating for the rights of landlords in Pasadena on Tuesday announced its plan to pursue a 2026 ballot initiative that aims to reform the city’s Rental Housing Board, which it says has been plagued by mismanagement and imbalance since its creation.

Pasadena Housing Providers, a coalition that represents family investors who own, maintain and renovate small multifamily housing units in the city, said the measure would “restore democratic oversight to the governance of Pasadena’s rental housing.”

“In the two years since Measure H was passed, under the guise of a rent control measure, the unelected and unaccountable Pasadena Rental Housing Board (PRHB) has missed numerous deadlines, brought chaos to Pasadena’s rental housing market, and failed to create the operational rental registry they had promised in the 2022 charter amendment,” the coalition said in a statement.

Pasadena’s spokesperson Lisa Derderian said in a statement Tuesday evening that no formal submission had been made by the group, so the city could not comment on the matter.

“The city has not received a formal submission from Pasadena Housing Providers (PHP) relating to an initiative measure for an upcoming election cycle,” she said. “For this reason, the city cannot comment on today’s press release from PHP.”

The coalition also criticized what it called the exclusion of landlords from key decision-making, noting that only one landlord serves on the 13-member Rental Housing Board. (The board is made up of seven tenants from each council district and four at-large members, along with one alternate for each group.)

They alleged that the appointment process has been dominated by individuals with strongly partisan views, which resulted in “unbalanced decisions due to a lack of relevant knowledge.”

“So this is about governance and about democracy. It’s not about rent control,” said Simon Gibbons, a coalition representative who co-owns and manages 12 apartment units in Pasadena. “We have no ambition to change the existing rent control level of 75% of the rate of inflation. What we’re trying to do instead is ensure that the regulations that go forward are fair, they can be justified, and most especially that there is a mechanism for dealing with anything crazy.”

The coalition said its proposed initiative will ensure that “key regulatory decisions are made by elected council members, not by unelected activists.”

The move comes on the heels of the two-year anniversary of the passage of Measure H, or the Pasadena Fair and Equitable Housing Charter Amendment, a ballot initiative Pasadena voters approved in 2022 to establish rent control and create an oversight board. But since then, property owners and the board have clashed over policy.

The landlords have repeatedly called for greater changes to Measure H to protect private property owners’ interests, especially when it comes to their representation on the Rental Housing Board.

They also attempted to bring legal challenges to stop Measure H, though that was defeated in court in March 2023.

“There’s two ways this could go,” Gibbons said. “We could either have a much more robust appointment system to the board, which would have fair representation of both sides, proper oversight, the ability to remove members who are abusing their position. That’s one way to do it. The other way is to make this like any other commission in Pasadena.”

This means that the board should be focused on making recommendations instead of setting regulations, he said.

“And bear in mind that the regulations of the rent board can put people in jail,” Gibbons said. “There are criminal penalties to some of the regulations they’re setting. So we’re saying instead that these kinds of decisions should be made by our democratically elected council members.”

Gibbons said the group is trying to gather input from community members over the next few months as part of its effort to draft the ballot initiative. He noted that the group needs to finalize its measure by June to meet the deadline for placing it on the November ballot.