LEWISTON — Before you can tell a landlord that there’s a problem with their building, you have to be able to find the landlord — and that’s not always easy, Code Enforcement Officer Tom Maynard said.

There’s no single place for city officials to look up landlords’ names and contact information, Maynard said. Many of Lewiston’s landlords have their identities hidden behind limited liability corporations.

“And some landlords really revel in their ability to stay hidden,” Maynard told a group of about 20 landlords gathered in the Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce’s meeting room. “They work very hard to remain anonymous.”

One solution might be to create a city license or a landlord registry, according to forum organizer Adilah Muhammad. Muhammad also serves on the city’s Downtown Neighborhood Task Force. She said the landlord’s thoughts and recommendations would be brought back to the task force.

Housing quality downtown has been a topic of concern among landlords, tenants and city officials this summer. City councilors voted this spring to hire a third code enforcement officer to focus on housing quality problems.

But Maynard said finding problems is sometimes easier than finding someone to fix them.

“The majority of landlords are great,” he said. “One call, I tell them the problem and they get right on it. And then I go back to working on the rest.”

Maynard said it sometimes involves going through county records to find owners, if their names are hidden behind corporations. He has better luck using the city’s water department accounts.

“Even that doesn’t mean that somebody has used their real name there,” he said. “If someone is going to be responsible, being able to call them and know they’ll pick up solves the problem so quickly.”

Chris Aceto, another of the forum’s organizers, said he thought it was wrong the city didn’t have some sort of registration already in place. For example, landlords who are behind in taxes or have code problems should not be allowed to rent to tenants getting public aid.

“There are buildings next to mine, you would not set three feet into that building,” he said. “Somebody, the city or someone else, is subsidizing that owner to be able to maintain that apartment. So, when I hear licensing program, I think of an instrument to be able to weed out that person that should not receive a subsidy.”

A good registration system would help that. It could range from a simple registration to something more elaborate involving fines and penalties.

“We know some communities outside of Maine don’t allow businesses without a proper license,” she said. The trick will be finding the right mix for Lewiston, she said.

The group Monday agreed that some level of registration would be helpful but worried about going too far. City Councilor Stephen Morgan said he’s worried about licensing fees that would force more landlords out of business.

“Let’s keep following the process here, logically,” Morgan said. “At some point, do we make it so expensive that a landlord is not going to be able to keep up the building? And then, they just give us the keys and walk away. That’s what we don’t want to happen.”

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