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thisoneisnotasbad t1_j54ma52 wrote

Hate to break it to you but yes, it would be legal.

For the water one, that sucks but that is VT. Growing up my school would have a boil water notice regularly because we were near a number of farms and the runoff impacted water quality. It still happens in a lot of places. If does not excuse it and the landlord should have done all they could to quickly fix it. I was more saying it is not uncommon or surprising.

For the mice, look at it from the other side. You called and reported them to the health inspector for a mice infestation that was not real. The health inspector said to keep using traps implying it is a normal level of mice in a VT trailer. Would you keep a renter who reported you to the state for a imagined infestation.

I’ll probably be downvoted again, I’ve been downvoted before but... VT renters rights are only good on paper. Once you get the state involved you realize they don’t really care and your landlord can legally kick you out (for a totally and unrelated coincidence of course). Complain and make reports at your own risk.

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boskie22 t1_j55xqph wrote

We realize many Vermonters have to boil their water from time to time, but there are strict rental laws about tenants having a safe, potable water supply. Sometimes renters have to boil it when there's water boil notices, but legally they can't have to boil it for every time due to consistent unsafe water that is due to a problem with the water supply. For weeks we couldn't use the water for anything at all, even washing our hands or showering, because it was full of bleach when they kept just pouring bleach in the water supply to try to fix the issue.

We mentioned the mice to the health inspector due to the very fact that our landlord wasn't taking sufficient action to curb the mice. They told the health inspector they were doing lots of trapping and blocking holes, but in 5 months they set 5 single traps and filled 3 out of many many holes. That's it. We realize our landlord isn't solely responsible for trapping and filling holes, we ourselves set and empty traps daily and continue blocking holes regularly. Our landlord often tells us they are coming to check and reset traps but they never come, and they don't want us removing certain panels to set traps because they don't want the panels to break, but there's always tons of mice in those places so we have no choice but to do it ourselves.

The mice issue was among the issues we reported to the health inspector. The chimney and roof were leaking, with water pouring down a wall whenever it rained. Our landlord responded by simply placing a trash bag over the chinney. There was tons of mold resulting from the leak. Additionally, there were fire safety violations that the health inspector was very concerned about and made our landlord fix.

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