If tenants or landlords don’t abide by city regulations, Evanston may soon slap them with fines.

Under a proposal being considered by a city committee, Evanston for the first time will be able to enforce its landlord-tenant ordinance, which governs the relationship between the two parties, by ticketing violators. Violators could then choose to pay up or present their case to a hearings officer.

The landlord-tenant ordinance includes a number of regulations. For example, it requires landlords to refund security deposits with an itemized list of all deductions. It also requires tenants to keep residences in livable conditions.

City Council’s Planning and Development committee postponed its recommendation of the proposal during its Oct. 9 meeting after aldermen requested additional information from city staff.

The council passed an ordinance July 24 that transfered prosecution of all ordinance violations — except for moving violations and those involving incarceration — to the judgment of hearing officers in Evanston. The system holds hearings for violations at the Evanston Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave., instead of transferring them to the Cook County courthouse, 5600 Old Orchard Road, in Skokie.

Enforcing the landlord-tenant ordinance would take the city into uncharted territory, said Paula Haynes, executive director of Evanston’s Human Relations Commission. The commission would be charged with ticketing offenders if the proposal is approved.

As of now, there is no method of compelling tenants or landlords to obey the ordinance, and the commission must resort to mediation when either party complains about a violation.

“Right now people come to my office, and we have to try to get people to abide by the law, be it through persuasion, coercion, or smoke and mirrors,” Haynes said Monday. “They don’t always do what we ask.”

This becomes a problem, she said, when landlords are dealing with messy tenants or when tenants are trying to retrieve long-overdue security deposits.

If the council passes the proposal, Human Relations Commission staff members will continue to investigate 2,500 to 3,000 complaints each year and will determine whether a party has violated the landlord-tenant ordinance.

“We want to say you have to pay a fine for not following the ordinance,” Haynes said. “This is an ordinance that is party-neutral. In a nutshell, it’s about who’s right, whether it be the landlord or the tenant.”

But aldermen at the Oct. 9 meeting voiced concerns about staffing, fine collection and the fairness of applying the ordinance to landlords who own few properties.

Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) said he did not think the change would be effective unless the commission hired more staff members to handle cases. He said the new system also would not make a big difference in landlord-tenant relations because of the city’s poor record of collecting fines.

But Haynes said she will present improvements to the proposal at the Planning and Development committee’s Oct. 23 meeting that will address these and other concerns.

“I feel I can do this with the staff I have, and if we find we need another person, then so be it,” Haynes said. “We will also set a fee schedule to collect the fines.”

Haynes also said she is prepared to clarify which cases will be mediated through alternative dispute resolutions and which will be referred to the administrative adjudication process.

Newman also said at the meeting that the change might be effective for landlords with six or more tenants but would be unfair to hold those who own one or two units to the same standards.

“I don’t have any problem getting the bad professional owner,” Newman said. “I have a problem getting the owner of the two-flat.”

Some city staff members, aldermen and residents disagreed.

“A violation of the law is a violation of the law, whether it’s 20 units or a double,” said David Bradford, former chair of the Human Relations Commission. “Frankly, as it stands now, if someone violates the ordinance all we have to force them to cooperate is the power of persuasion.”