One of the first: Landlord repays housing benefit following new legislation - Beckhams Property Services
Thurrock Council has reclaimed over £1,000 of housing benefit paid to rogue Landlord Tobe Ayandare following a tribunal.
The Landlord was initially fined £9,000 in March this year, for failing to comply with an improvement notice under the Housing Act (2004) and part of new Legislation introduced under the Housing and Planning Act (2016).
At the same time, Property Management Agency, Cephas Homes Limited were also fined £2,000 and its Directors Boianie Idowu and Olumide Idowu fined £5,000 each, plus ordered to pay costs and a victim surcharge.
The occupier of Ayandare’s property in South Ockendon made a complaint to Council Officers who found it to have ten different Health & Safety hazards, including rodent infestation, a leaking boiler and insecure window frames and doors.
Following the Landlord’s failure to comply with the improvement notice issued and the subsequent March prosecution, Thurrock Council sought to recover the housing benefit payments it had made to the Landlord during the ten-week period he had failed to comply with the improvement notice.
“This is a landmark case for the Council. I am delighted that not only have we been able to prosecute and ensure the necessary improvement works are carried out at the Landlord’s expense, but also to recover rent for the very first time. Everyone should have a good quality place to live and will not tolerate Landlords exploiting their Tenants by taking rent, or taxpayers’ money in the form of housing benefit, while forcing them to live in unacceptable conditions,” said Councillor Barry Johnson, Thurrock Council’s portfolio holder for housing.
If you require further information regarding Health & Safety, please sign-up to our website for free, call, email or visit our office, where we’ll be happy to discuss in further detail with you.
Do you remember Skull Coast? It might have been a few years. Maybe since about 2011 since those beers were available in South Carolina. Like the pirate and skull from which its logo comes, so is their tale one of intrigue, mystery, and some choppy seas.
First, a history. Skull Coast was incorporated (legally, it’s an LLC) in South Carolina in 2009. Back then, it was known as the Skull Coast Ale Company, LLC, and was based in the Rock Hill/Fort Mill area. Because the company did not have a great deal of investment capital, it became what is called a contract brewery. If you’re not familiar with the term, it essentially means that it is a brewery with no physical location that contracts with established breweries to brew their beers. Skull Coast partnered with RJ Rockers in Spartanburg to do this. The result was very respected beers like Gallows Point Dead Man Porter, Sea Witch Watermelon Wheat Ale, Scallywag Extra Pale Ale, and Maelstrom IPA. While the beers were in fairly limited distribution, they could usually be found in either the Upstate or Columbia markets. They were even available at Carolina Panthers games in Charlotte for awhile.
At that time, South Carolina did not have the Pint Law, thereby limiting what breweries could serve on site to patrons. Skull Coast saw an opportunity and left contract brewing with RJ Rockers to go to North Carolina, with its more favorable laws. The company Skull Coast Brewing Company, Inc. was incorporated in North Carolina in 2011. Finding a home in Hickory, North Carolina, the brewery began work on bringing in a 30bbl brewing system as well as an automated canning system, with a 1,500 square foot taproom. The brewery was to be located in the Hollar Hosiery Mill project, with Skull Coast signing a lease in April of 2012.
However, things did not go according to plan. You can read the entire history (which is well documented in the brewery’s blog) about what happened instead. That’s available here: http://skullcoastbrewing.com/captains-blog/ To make a long story short, there were some development setbacks, some disputes, and later, discovery of liens against the Hosiery Mill. Seeing these issues, that appears to be when Skull Coast decided to (for lack of a better term) abandon ship. Skull Coast went radio silent at the end of September 2013.
Until now. Recently, Skull Coast has announced that there is a new owner and president of the company. In posts on Facebook and Twitter, the company announced:
Skull Coast is pleased to announce that it has a new owner and president! One of her first actions has been to look at three potential brewery sites for her planned 15-bbl brewing system: Rock Hill, SC, Wilmington, NC, and Savannah, GA. Stay tuned for more announcements in the coming days!
The company was then flooded with responses, mainly from those in the Rock Hill area wanting the company to return home. The company was quick to caution though that Rock Hill had not been as aggressive in pursuing the brewery as had Wilmington and Savannah. The company went on to say that as to Rock Hill, a general contractor was putting together a quote to fit the space the brewery was interested in, which is a space right off of I-77. However, it again cautioned that Wilmington and Savannah were being more aggressive on the economic development side in attracting the brewery with financial incentives. Whether Rock Hill can meet or beat those is still unknown. The brewery did assure, though, that even if it went to Savannah or Wilmington that it has maintained its distributors in both South Carolina and North Carolina, so product would be available in both places.
So, now, that begs many questions. What will Skull Coast do? Will it come back home to South Carolina after leaving? Will it stay in North Carolina? Will it set sail to a new state? How are breweries to balance the needs of being a for-profit business with other considerations, such as communities in which they are located (or were located)? Does it even need to? For some, these are difficult questions. There are many factors to consider for the company, such as communities, economic incentives, and favorable laws. What will win out? What are your thoughts?
These days, I’m trying to limit this blog to legal issues impacting South Carolina (and regional) breweries. However, this was an issue that does evoke strong feelings in some people. I found it to be worth writing about. Certainly, laws in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia will be considered in the company’s decision. I’d like to speak on those in a future blog.
Tags: north carolina beer, rock hill, skull coast ales, skull coast beer, skull coast brewing, south carolina beer
Is there anything to update on this since January? We are a big fan of the porter and watermelon wheat and would love to have them back in Myrtle Beach again. It seems like with them gone this long, they have decided to permanently abandon ship.
My understanding is that they are out of the beer business and have moved into spirits. Specifically, rum.
Winter is a time for reading in beekeeping. I recently finish Simple, Smart Beekeeping by husband and wife team Kirsten Shoshanna Traynor (Author) and Michael Joseph Traynor (Contributor). I purchased the book at the VSBA Fall meeting, where Dr. Traynor and Michael spoke twice: once on the topic of pesticides, and again on beekeeping in Germany. Both were quite interesting so I supported their efforts by buying their book. The cost is a bit steep: $34.95 right now on Amazon; the meeting price was $25. Continue reading →
In the meantime, I finished up my winter reading, and thought I would share a summary of this rather interesting book. Continue reading →
February 21, 2016 Erik	Bee Louse, Books, Laying Workers, Queen Substance, William Longgood	5 Comments
This past week in bee school we learned about bee diseases and pests, from the tiny viruses to the dreaded mites and the much larger skunks and bears. Continue reading →
The fetchart plugin retrieves album art images from various sources on the Web and stores them as image files.
By default, beets stores album art image files alongside the music files for an album in a file called cover.jpg. To customize the name of this file, use the art_filename config option. To embed the art into the files’ tags, use the EmbedArt Plugin. (You’ll want to have both plugins enabled.)
cautious: Pick only trusted album art by ignoring filenames that do not contain one of the keywords in cover_names. Default: no.
cover_names: Prioritize images containing words in this list. Default: cover front art album folder.
minwidth: Only images with a width bigger or equal to minwidth are considered as valid album art candidates. Default: 0.
maxwidth: A maximum image width to downscale fetched images if they are too big. The resize operation reduces image width to at most maxwidth pixels. The height is recomputed so that the aspect ratio is preserved.
enforce_ratio: Only images with a width:height ratio of 1:1 are considered as valid album art candidates if set to yes. It is also possible to specify a certain deviation to the exact ratio to still be considered valid. This can be done either in pixels (enforce_ratio: 10px) or as a percentage of the longer edge (enforce_ratio: 0.5%). Default: no.
sources: List of sources to search for images. An asterisk * expands to all available sources. Default: filesystem coverart itunes amazon albumart, i.e., everything but wikipedia, google and fanarttv. Enable those sources for more matches at the cost of some speed. They are searched in the given order, thus in the default config, no remote (Web) art source are queried if local art is found in the filesystem. To use a local image as fallback, move it to the end of the list. For even more fine-grained control over the search order, see the section on Album Art Sources below.
Previously, there was a remote_priority option to specify when to look for art on the filesystem. This is still respected, but a deprecation message will be shown until you replace this configuration with the new filesystem value in the sources array.
Here’s an example that makes plugin select only images that contain front or back keywords in their filenames and prioritizes the iTunes source over others:
By default, the command will only look for album art when the album doesn’t already have it; the -f or --force switch makes it search for art in Web databases regardless. If you specify a query, only matching albums will be processed; otherwise, the command processes every album in your library.
Beets can resize images using Pillow, ImageMagick, or a server-side resizing proxy. If either Pillow or ImageMagick is installed, beets will use those; otherwise, it falls back to the resizing proxy. If the resizing proxy is used, no resizing is performed for album art found on the filesystem—only downloaded art is resized. Server-side resizing can also be slower than local resizing, so consider installing one of the two backends for better performance.
When using ImageMagick, beets looks for the convert executable in your path. On some versions of Windows, the program can be shadowed by a system-provided convert.exe. On these systems, you may need to modify your %PATH% environment variable so that ImageMagick comes first or use Pillow instead.
By default, this plugin searches for art in the local filesystem as well as on the Cover Art Archive, the iTunes Store, Amazon, and AlbumArt.org, in that order. You can reorder the sources or remove some to speed up the process using the sources configuration option.
When looking for local album art, beets checks for image files located in the same folder as the music files you’re importing. Beets prefers to use an image file whose name contains “cover”, “front”, “art”, “album” or “folder”, but in the absence of well-known names, it will use any image file in the same folder as your music files.
For some of the art sources, the backend service can match artwork by various criteria. If you want finer control over the search order in such cases, you can use this alternative syntax for the sources option:
where listing a source without matching criteria will default to trying all available strategies. Entries of the forms coverart: release releasegroup and coverart: * are also valid. Currently, only the coverart source supports multiple criteria: namely, release and releasegroup, which refer to the respective MusicBrainz IDs.
When you choose to apply changes during an import, beets will search for art as described above. For “as-is” imports (and non-autotagged imports using the -A flag), beets only looks for art on the local filesystem.
Note that the Google custom search API is limited to 100 queries per day. After that, the fetchart plugin will fall back on other declared data sources.
Although not strictly necessary right now, you might think about registering a personal fanart.tv API key. Set the fanarttv_key configuration option to your key, then add fanarttv to the list of sources in your configuration.
More detailed information can be found on their blog. Specifically, the personal key will give you earlier access to new art.
Storing the current artwork’s source might be used to narrow down fetchart commands. For example, if some albums have artwork placed manually in their directories that should not be replaced by a forced album art fetch, you could do