Landlords and tenants will have another chance to influence Evanston City Council’s decision on an ordinance that would both enforce and amend regulation of the landlord-tenant relationship.

At a special meeting Monday, the council’s Planning and Development Committee unanimously voted to return proposed amendments on the city’s residential landlord-tenant ordinance to the Human Relations Commission for further consideration. Members of the committee directed the commission to re-evaluate the amendments after residents voiced heated opinions at a public hearing in the council chambers.

Some requirements of the ordinance include forcing landlords to refund security deposits with an itemized list of all deductions and ensuring that tenants keep residences in livable conditions. If passed, an ordinance amending current landlord-tenant regulations would enforce the city’s policies for the first time since the adoption of the original ordinance in 1975.

Aldermen hope to enforce the landlord-tenant ordinance through an administrative adjudication process, a system in which hearings for violations are held at the Evanston Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave., instead of transferring them to the Cook County Courthouse, 5600 Old Orchard Road, Skokie. Previously, landlords and tenants relied on the Human Relations Commission to mediate disputes.

Paula Haynes, executive director of the commission, said she expected the committee to return the ordinance to the commission for improvement because of wide division and misunderstandings among landlords and tenants.

“One of my concerns right now is I don’t know how I could get the landlords and tenants together and reach a consensus,” Haynes said. “If I could do that, we would get a president elected and achieve world peace.”

But world peace was far from the minds of the landlords and tenants who packed the council chambers and voiced passionate opinions about the commission’s recommendations.

Linda Bush, president of the Evanston Property Owners Association, said the Human Relations Commission had shown consistent “bias for decades” against the city’s landlords in mediating disputes and now in creating amendments to the ordinance that she said clearly favored tenants. Instead of targeting bad landlords, the city would force property owners to leave by proposing amendments that penalized the larger number of landlords who are good, she said.

“If you keep overregulating one part of the population, we’re shooting ourselves as a community in the foot,” Bush said.

Lilly Monzayanni, an Evanston landlord, said giving tenants more power was the wrong way to solve landlord-tenant issues. Tenants have been abusive to the apartments they rented from her and have lied to city officials and police about their living situations without being punished, she said.

“That’s not justice,” Monzayanni said. “I am sure there are good tenants here and there are bad landlords here, but if you want to make this law so difficult for the landowners and give more power to the tenants, it’s not going to be right.”

Jason Nehal, a tenant and member of the Evanston Housing Commission, said he believed in the need to enforce the ordinance after his experience with a delinquent landlord caused his family to live without a working toilet for 17 days. He said that after consulting attorneys about how to address complaints against his landlord, he was told to rely on the Human Relations Commission mediation efforts to resolve his dispute.

“This ordinance has worked for me,” he said. “The landlord-tenant relationship should also have some kind of remedy under the law and, because we found that remedies aren’t as available to some landlords and to many tenants financially, the idea of adjudicating in a place close to home these kind of disputes makes sense as long as they are fair on both sides.”

Members of the Planning and Development Committee said they would not vote on an ordinance until all matters had thoroughly been examined.

Ald. Joseph Kent (5th) said he appreciated residents’ comments because he now could understand the full range of issues surrounding the proposed amendments. He said consensus could only be reached after many months and perhaps years of research and debate.

“We have a lot to pull together,” he said.