When Lea Hill residents who’d worked with the City of Auburn to draft the original communal housing ordinance in 2013 wrapped up their labors, they said they had good reasons to trust that the regulations they’d sweated over capped the number of tenants at four at a time.

In May of 2014, two conditional use permit applications from the same applicant to continue to operate communal housing on Lea Hill underwent a public hearing before the City’s hearing examiner, which established approval for up to seven residents.

Riled neighbors showed up in mass at that hearing and raised hell. One furious neighbor called the City’s action a “stab in the back;” a second labeled it “a betrayal.”

Within weeks, the City slapped a year-long moratorium on the acceptance of applications for communal residences to allow staff and the planning commission to work out the kinks.

Jeff Tate, assistant director of community development services for the City of Auburn, briefed City leaders Monday on the revised ordinance, which its framers say will seal up the gaps and along the way clarify a few things left fuzzy in the first ordinance. If adopted by the City Council, the ordinance would lift the moratorium and establish permanent regulations relating to review, licensing requirements and land-use standards for future potential communal residences.

Here, Tate said, is what the draft ordinance would do:

• Set the cap on communal residences to four tenants, eliminating that pesky conditional use permit option.

• Preserve the right for an annual City inspection of communal residences, which was in the first version.

• Clarify that other types of housing arrangements, such as adult care homes, are not to be defined or regulated in the same way as communal housing in the City code.

“There’s language in here that’s intended to make clear that communal residences stand on their own, and that other forms of living arrangements stand on their own and are treated differently,” Tate explained. “We wanted to do that especially because there are state laws, and there are court cases, and there are other licensing requirements for those living arrangements, and they are treated differently.”

• Require that communal housing operators provide one on-site parking space for each resident. The proposed ordinance also allows each housing owner to provide an affidavit demonstrating that if a tenant doesn’t own a vehicle, no parking space need be provided.

“We were pretty comfortable with that kind of concept because it’s not hard to investigate what exists on site — vehicles that are coming and going — to understand whether a property owner is able to provide full, on-site parking for all of its tenants. It says in there that if City staff ask for the affidavit, it should be provided on site.”

Councilmember Largo Wales asked what would happen to the two existing communal housing arrangements approved by the hearing examiner that exceed four adults.

Tate said that of the seven communal residence licenses issued before the moratorium, only the two above exceed four tenants. Hearing Examiner Phil Olbrechts approved those for a conditional use permit but attached a number of conditions to it: one is that if the housing license remains in good standing, it is a grandfathered license. But the hearing examiner included some performance conditions, Tate continued.

“For the first three years, there are a number of things that the property owner has to do to ensure that (the communal housing) continues to fit into the neighborhood. I believe the hearing examiner was comfortable doing that because the owner of the houses lives close and can keep a very close eye on what is happening on those properties. So the license is vested, but the conditional use permit creates an opening for what you do after three years.”

Nearby residents originally approached the City because they were concerned that too many tenants, most of them students at nearby Green River Community College, were being crammed into houses that were built as single-family residences.