Colorado law prohibits evictions over unpaid utilities. Advocates say landlords do it anyway.

Mary Collins started to panic in March when she heard people beating on her door at the Cedar Run Apartments in southeast Denver.

The 57-year-old was up-to-date on her rent, but she was late paying her utilities and an assortment of fees covering pest control, property taxes, trash, sewer and common-area maintenance.

Collins is disabled and cannot work. She has a Housing Choice, or Section 8, voucher, which means the Denver Housing Authority pays 100% of her rent and provides an allowance to cover utilities.

But that allowance doesn’t cover all the fees, so Collins is perpetually worried about how to make up the difference.

And eviction threats keep pounding at her door.

“I’m so depressed,” she said. “I don’t know where to turn.”

Colorado law prohibits landlords from evicting people who utilize voucher or subsidy programs solely over the nonpayment of utilities. Yet this phenomenon is happening frequently across the state, advocates and legal aid organizations say.

Residents often don’t know their rights and lack legal representation, leaving them unable to adequately defend themselves in court against well-resourced landlords.

Several advocates and attorneys who spoke to The Denver Post argued it’s also unlawful for people to be evicted over unpaid fees. Such cases are also commonly occurring, they said.

“It’s really frustrating and it’s really morally questionable,” said Zach Neumann, co-founder and CEO of the Denver-based Community Economic Defense Project, which provides legal assistance for clients facing eviction. “If you’re one of these landlords, you know for a fact you cannot evict for these reasons, but you file anyway. You do it because you know the folks on the other side don’t have the resources to fight it.”

Meanwhile, lawmakers who passed recent eviction-protection legislation say they’re concerned landlords are not following the law. A tenant organization, the Denver Metro Tenants’ Union, said it’s working on further legislation to clarify state statute.

“If a landlord cannot legally evict someone, they may not knowingly threaten to do so,” said Eida Altman, the union’s director. “When they make threats to do something illegal unless they receive payment, often for illegal fees, that sounds a lot like extortion.”

Representatives of Gelt Venture Partners — owners of the Cedar Run complex, which was renamed Meridian at Cherry Creek last month — did not respond to a request for comment.

There is no data on the number of these types of evictions in Colorado, though advocates said anecdotal evidence suggests they’re becoming more prevalent.

Drew Hamrick, general counsel and senior vice president of government affairs for the Colorado Apartment Association, said he can’t imagine that these types of cases make up a significant number of the eviction filings in the state. Many of these disputes, he said, come down to the facts of each case and whether a judge deems the breach of a lease to be “material” or “immaterial.”

“To a poverty advocate, all those cases are not material,” Hamrick said in an interview. “Housing providers will claim the case is material. That’s what a judge is there for.”

How junk fees lead to eviction demands

The Housing Choice Voucher Program, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and administered by Colorado’s more than 68 housing authorities, helps low-income families, elderly persons, veterans and disabled individuals afford housing in the private market.

The program pays part of one’s rent — usually 30% of a person’s monthly income. For people like Collins, who have no income, the housing agency pays their entire rent, plus the utilities stipend.

The problem? The proliferation of so-called “junk fees.”

Once reserved for the commercial property market, landlords in recent years have increasingly added a host of additional charges to residential rental leases, often without advertising them on the unit’s listing. And these fees can add up quickly.

Nearly 50 renters told The Post last year about the myriad add-ons landlords snuck into their monthly bills: boiler management fees, pest control fees, parking fees, package delivery fees — even service fees to pay for a program that adds up all the other fees.

In response, lawmakers this year passed a bill banning several fees that have been common in rental housing. The law, House Bill 1090, also requires companies to show the total price of the product or service they’re selling, including any mandatory charges and fees included. It goes into effect Jan. 1.

For voucher-holders with no income, these fees represent additional charges that aren’t fully covered by their federal subsidy.

Depending on the month, Collins and other renters at the rechristened Meridian at Cherry Creek owe roughly $200 every month in fees and utilities. The allowance from the Denver Housing Authority only covers part of the bill.

The Denver Housing Authority sees the issue of junk fees exceeding utility allowances, though the agency doesn’t believe the problem to be widespread, said Loretta Owens, the agency’s director of the Housing Choice Voucher Program. She encouraged voucher holders to carefully read their leases to ensure they know about all the fees a landlord might require.

The agency has already begun asking landlords to disclose all mandatory fees in their total rental cost so the agency and renters know exactly how much a unit will run.

“We haven’t seen housing providers do that widespread,” Owens said in an interview. “We’re exploring how much force we can put behind that request.”

Latosca Hults, a disabled resident who also lives in the complex, racked up more than $600 of debt — all from unpaid utilities and fees — over four months.

Management in October sent Hults a demand for payment, known as a “demand for compliance or possession.” Under a section describing the lease violations, management wrote: utilities.

“Grounds for eviction,” the letter states. “You must comply with your lease by curing the lease violations cited below. The landlord demands that you either cure these grounds for eviction, or vacate.”

Hults, after seeing the letter, said she started to spiral. By March, her debt had risen to some $2,000. Management sent her another eviction notice.

“What if I lose my voucher? What if I become homeless?” Hults said she wondered. “What if it impacts my credit score and I never get another place to live?”

Depression and anxiety set in.

At the last minute, Hults staved off eviction through assistance from Denver’s Temporary Rental & Utility Assistance program.

Common violations of Colorado law

But housing attorneys and advocates say Hults never should have been given an eviction notice to begin with.

House Bill 23-1095 prohibits rental agreements from including provisions that allow a housing provider operating under a voucher or subsidy program to pursue an eviction “solely on the nonpayment of utilities.”

Yet the Denver Metro Tenants’ Union, along with attorneys from the Colorado Poverty Law Project, the Community Economic Defense Project, Colorado Legal Services and other private-practice lawyers who specialize in eviction cases told The Post that they see landlords pursue evictions in these cases all the time.

“Our perspective is this is patently unlawful,” said Jack Regenbogen, deputy executive director for the Colorado Poverty Law Project.

State Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, a Pueblo Democrat who sponsored HB-1095, said he’d be very concerned if eviction courts were being inundated by these illegal actions.

“The intent of the legislation passed is if you’re on hard items and struggling with certain payments, but you’re able to make the housing payment, that you should not lose your housing because of that,” he said. “That’s something that shouldn’t be taken lightly and be discarded, especially when you are making payment on the housing itself.”

Joel Minor, deputy director of advocacy for Colorado Legal Services, said his organization has several active disputes in unpaid utility cases where the landlord argues that they’re not considered a “housing provider” under the law, and therefore the statute doesn’t apply to them.

Legal aid organizations also say they’re seeing eviction cases over unpaid fees — and there’s a debate over whether these are also illegal.

Neumann, of the Community Economic Defense Project, said his organization believes Colorado’s statutes only allow for evictions over unpaid rent — meaning landlords cannot force someone out of their home over outstanding fees.

Minor said only certain fees — such as late fees — are expressly barred from being the basis of an eviction. Other categories of fees can be used in eviction proceedings, he said. Still, Colorado Legal Services regularly sees cases where landlords pursue evictions over outstanding late fees.

Some of the ambiguity stems from the fact that Colorado’s eviction laws don’t define the word “rent,” said Jason Legg, co-founder and lead attorney for Justice for the People, a nonprofit aimed at protecting tenants.

“This is part of the problem,” Neumann said. “It’s confusing, especially for renters and those using vouchers to pay all or part of their rent.”

Hamrick, representing the Colorado Apartment Association, said it takes the average housing provider four months and some $10,000 to pursue an eviction, calling the time and money a “huge guardrail on any rental housing provider using the process for a nonmaterial problem.”

“No person on Earth is going to lose $10,000 over a $1,500 bill,” he said.

Many of these legal fights come down to which judge or which county the case falls in, Hamrick said. The question is not whether the nonpayment violates the lease, he said, but whether the nonpayment of utilities represents a “material violation of the lease.”

There are also situations, he said, where people “decide not to use that (voucher) money to pay their utilities and instead put it in their pocket.”