Stalder downplays connection to Maximus Bossarei despite close ties
Laramie City Councilor denies ‘ownership interests’ in select properties, calls landlord a ‘friend’
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| 1111 East Flint Street, one of Bossarei's rental properties. (Photo credit: Jeff Victor) |
Since the story’s publication, fresh tales of mistreatment have come to light — more stories of unreturned deposits, threats and dismal living conditions.
One former tenant shared how raw sewage leaked into their apartment from the unit above for weeks with no reprieve, and how the strain of being Bossarei’s tenants drove her husband and her to marriage counseling. Another shared how he eventually had to let go of his anger and let Bossarei keep the entirety of his stimulus check, believing the landlord would never, or could never, be brought to justice.
The original feature — as well as court documents and interviews with numerous former tenants — cite Laramie City Councilor Jessica Stalder as acting on Bossarei’s behalf in communications with prospective tenants. In this role, Stalder advertises apartments, conducts unit showings, and helps to establish new tenants in new homes.
While her involvement in Bossarei’s operation appears to be limited beyond that, several former tenants describe her small role as vital to the landlord’s ability to keep renting his various properties across town.
Multiple tenants doubt whether they would have ever rented from Bossarei if not for their comparatively pleasant experiences with Stalder. When Taylor Gordon and her husband moved into Bossarei’s property on Flint Street, they dealt exclusively with Stalder until the papers were signed — and exclusively with Bossarei beyond that.
Gordon described the move as a “bait-and-switch.”
“It felt very intentional to me that Jessica was my only point of contact until basically the contract was signed,” she said. “It was sort of good cop/bad cop. We got the good cop until we signed the lease, and then it was Max.”
Jibran Ludwig, another former tenant of Bossarei’s, had a similar opinion.
“Max uses her as a human shield for his business,” Ludwig said. “She’s the point person in many tenant interactions and — unlike Max — is reasonably nice and polite, so people are less likely to direct their frustration at her.”
Most of the complaints and lawsuits detailed in the original story, and this one, involve Bossarei’s personal conduct — allegedly double-charging rent, keeping deposits unjustly, refusing to fix broken appliances or dangerous issues, and allegedly threatening tenants verbally or via texts or emails.
But many tenants say the hellish experiences they have had in Bossarei’s rental properties were made possible by their initial communication with Stalder — the friendly, and sometimes only, face that people see before moving into the place where they will spend the worst year of their life.
Stalder did not respond to a request for comment before the publication of this story.
Stalder downplays relationship with Bossarei
Following the Laramie Boomerang’s publication of an investigative feature into Bossarei’s rental practice, more than two dozen additional former tenants came forward on social media or in calls and emails, sharing their stories of alleged mistreatment.
Those stories allege everything from unreturned deposits to substandard living conditions — tales echoing the many alleged abuses described in the original article. The original article also outlined an alleged pattern of double-charging rent, which was the subject of several civil suits tenants attempted to bring against Bossarei. The article also highlighted the Albany County Sheriff’s Office’s repeated failure to serve Bossarei court summons.
Laramie City Councilor Jessica Stalder responded to the feature via her council campaign Facebook profile, publishing a similar statement as a letter to the editor in the Laramie Boomerang. She did not reply to multiple requests for comment before the original story’s publication despite being contacted via texts, calls and emails throughout the course of a week.
Stalder was mentioned multiple times in the original investigative feature. As an intermediary between Bossarei and his tenants, the councilor was named in at least two civil suits alleging that Bossarei had mistreated former or prospective tenants. Additionally, several tenants described Stalder’s role as an important link between themselves and Bossarei.
In her statement, Stalder says that Bossarei is her “friend” and further that she does not officially work for him or his company.
“Despite recent allegations in the Laramie Boomerang, I do not have an ownership interest in any of the properties that were the subject of the recent Laramie Boomerang article, nor do I work for him or his company,” Stalder writes in her statement. “While I have in the past helped my friend advertise his properties and communicate with a handful of tenants from time to time, my involvement was limited.”
Stalder co-owns a West Laramie house with Maximus Bossarei according to Albany County Assessor records. The property appears to have been purchased from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It is not clear if this is a rental property, or one in which either or both Stalder and Bossarei reside. The records list the address as residential, but that does not necessarily mean that the owners live there.
Some of Bossarei’s rental properties are also listed as residential, while others are listed as commercial. Additionally, Stalder co-owns another residential property in Laramie (without Bossarei), according to the County Assessor’s ownership map.
‘I sat down on the floor and cried’
According to various former tenants and more than one civil suit brought against Max Bossarei, Stalder’s role in Bossarei’s operation is generally limited to the outset of the lease — showing the rental unit virtually or in-person, and communicating with potential tenants.
Stalder sometimes does this through her “Jessica Rae” or “Alex Rae” Facebook profiles, which are unconnected to her council Facebook profile, “Jessica Stalder for Laramie City Council Ward 1.”
According to several former tenants interviewed for this story, Stalder generally acts as an intermediary between Bossarei and people considering his rentals. Once tenants are moved in, they have little if any contact with Stalder for the remainder of their lease.
Taylor Gordon and her husband were two such tenants.
Gordon was pursuing a creative writing MFA at the University of Wyoming. Coming from halfway across the country, she and her husband were not able to view the rental unit in person before their big move.
“I searched for weeks to find a pet-friendly rental and finally found the basement at 1111 East Flint Street,” Gordon said. “Jessica did the video walkthrough and seemed professional and nice. The apartment looked okay, not ideal, but we were desperate to find anywhere that would accept our large dog, so we took it — like many of Max’s tenants — sight unseen.”
The couple drove for two days across the country, bringing everything they owned to Wyoming’s university town. Once in Laramie, Bossarei quickly handed them the key and left before anyone went inside.
“When we got inside and I saw the place, I sat down on the floor and cried,” Gordon said. “The apartment was filthy, there wasn’t even a living room, the bathroom had a plastic cutting board with the Wal-Mart label still stuck to it taped haphazardly in the window — I guess so people walking by couldn’t look down into the window to see us showering?”
She added that the kitchen was extremely outdated, with a stove she had to light by hand. But she counts herself lucky to have had a usable stove at all, given the experience of some other tenants. The insulation between floors was “non-existent,” Gordon said, and they could hear every step their upstairs neighbors took.
“Any attempts to address the issue or file a noise complaint were met with hostility and threats — we had no peace or quiet in our home for almost a year,” Gordon said. “My husband clashed with Max early and often. Whenever we would request that Max fix a leak or any run-of-the-mill issue he would send us threatening emails in response with many trumped-up, untrue examples of how we were in violation of our lease.”
This description echoes the claims of many other former tenants, who said Bossarei would keep a running tally of lease violations and bring them up whenever maintenance was requested. While many former tenants say that the majority of these supposed lease violations were fabricated, they doubted their ability to prove otherwise and, feeling threatened, would drop their maintenance request and get used to faulty appliances or what they viewed as dangerous surroundings.
At first, Gordon tried to excuse Bossarei’s weird behavior and Stalder’s involvement in the situation.
“I feel like Max gaslights you into thinking you’re the only person he’s having issues with,” Gordon said. “I know that’s what happened with us. He’d say things like ‘I’ve had hundreds of tenants and you’re the worst I’ve ever had’ ... I was giving Jessica the benefit of doubt. I knew she has a kid. Maybe she’s working to make ends meet. I can’t tell you how often I was trying to make excuses for everybody involved in this whole deal.”
But Gordon said it soon became clear to the couple that they were extending too much charity to Bossarei and, by extension, Stalder. They felt they had been the victims of a “bait-and-switch” — dealing with a friendly, professional Stalder who nodded along when they discussed plans of adding a flower box to the yard, then being handed over to a threat-making landlord who grew combative whenever basic maintenance was requested.
“Our experience with Max was the absolute worst we’ve ever had with another person or landlord, and that was before our upstairs neighbor’s toilet began to leak raw sewage into our apartment,” Gordon said. “On one occasion, we could hear them up there plunging their clogged toilet as cups of brown sludge poured directly from the exposed sewage pipe into our bathroom.”
Gordon said this grim state of affairs lasted for six weeks, during which Bossarei did little more than send a handyman to rip out the bathroom ceiling, exposing the pipes of the apartment above.
“On several other occasions they tried to blow the pipes dry with my blow dryer to stop them from constantly leaking urine and fecal matter,” Gordon said. “He refused to do the necessary repair so the toilet was still leaking into our apartment when we broke lease and moved out three months early.”
Gordon said the dismal conditions she and her husband dealt with every day of their lease — coupled with the occasional threats of legal action sent to them via text — put the couple under considerable and sustained mental strain.
“On top of the physical struggles of the reality of living every day in that hovel, the stress also had a serious mental and emotional impact on us both,” Gordon said. “We were deeply in despair and even entered marriage counseling as the stress and misery began to break down our relationship. The huge majority of that burden was lifted off us the moment we moved out.”
Gordon and her husband continued to pay rent through the three months they no longer lived at 1111 E. Flint. They never received their deposit.
Like many Laramie tenants, the couple had little faith they would ever see justice pursuing Bossarei through the legal system. Such a course of action would cost the couple even more money — whether or not Bossarei even got served.
But more than that, Gordon cannot stand the thought of being in the same room as Bossarei, of inviting him back into their lives. Like many former tenants, they report having had to let go of their anger surrounding the situation, even if that meant losing out on thousands of dollars they felt they were owed.
“We don’t have that kind of expendable income,” Gordon said. “We were lucky to have family help to get through that because it was so terrible. But we don’t have expendable income — that’s why we’re renting from Max. It’s no small sacrifice on our part, but peace of mind is sort of priceless.”
Jessica Stalder and the Laramie City Council
Stalder has served as a Laramie City Council member since early 2019 and as Hospice of Laramie executive director since August.
Several former tenants were outraged upon learning of her prominent role in the community and her position of power. Many, who had dealt with Stalder through her “Jessica Rae” Facebook profile, only learned of Stalder’s council membership upon reading the original Laramie Boomerang article about Bossarei.
Gordon and her husband knew earlier than that, however, because Bossarei used the yard at their rental to display a large campaign sign for Stalder in 2018. (Bossarei frequently and prominently displays campaign signs in front of his rental units.)
“I think it’s unethical for (Stalder) to be allowed to hold public office and do what she’s doing or be involved in what she’s involved in,” Gordon said.
The council meets publicly on Tuesday evenings, and members of the public are welcome to dial into the Zoom call and give their thoughts during blocks of time set aside for public comment. But because of the council’s code of conduct, public commenters are not allowed to address or attack individual city councilors. If a member of the public begins to discuss the “Max and Jessica” issue, as Travis Rainey did earlier this month, Mayor Paul Weaver is likely to interrupt the comment and inform the commenter of the rules, albeit gently.
“I wanted to make sure that they all knew who they were working with,” Rainey said of his comment. “One of their colleagues — who is supposed to be determining local policy — happens to be someone who is ripping off the people she is supposedly representing.”
Floating between seasonal wildlife jobs at the outset of the pandemic, Rainey was looking for a short-term rental in Laramie last spring. He said he made the mistake of looking into Bossarei’s main Third Street property — the large black complex formerly known as the Xenion Motel.
“I was basically in Laramie without a place to stay and just needed to find a month lease,” he said. “It was $600 for this shitty motel room, but it was the only place I could really find that was willing to do just a month. I was willing to do that, but they also wanted a $600 deposit. And I thought, that would really suck if I didn’t get that back. $1,200 — that’s my whole stimulus check.”
Rainey said Stalder showed him a unit at the motel. He was far from impressed, but he was also out of options.
“It was dumpy, but I had lived in equally dumpy places and I figured, well, it’s just a month.”
Rainey had to split the $1,200 payment between cash and PayPal, because it exceeded his daily withdrawal limit. He would never see any of that money again.
Seeing as he would only be in the unit for a single month, Rainey asked if he could get his deposit back soon after he moved out. While the lease stipulated that Bossarei would have two months to return that deposit, Rainey knew $600 would really help him out during a difficult time.
Rainey said Bossarei responded to the request with fury.
“And from there it just got worse and worse,” Rainey said. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m not trying to ask for favors, I just figured I would ask. I understand you have 60 days, but I figured maybe you could expedite it.’ And he just got nasty. He threatened me at one point, and said something like, ‘If you upset me, you’re not going to like the consequences.’”
Like Gordon, Rainey tried to apply a charitable interpretation to his interactions with Bossarei. Initially, he took the threat of “consequences” to mean financial consequences. But hearing and reading other tenant’s stories, Rainey doesn’t know whether that threat represented something more menacing.
The deposit was never returned. Instead, Bossarei mailed Rainey a bill for $900, claiming the one-month tenant had ruined the carpet. Rainey said the carpet was filthy upon his move-in, and that he personally deep-cleaned it before his move-out.
“He said because I didn’t get it professionally done, I didn’t know what I was doing with the carpet cleaner and he had to replace it — which is bullshit,” Rainey said. “I spoke with a neighbor who said there was somebody in there the next day, so of course he didn’t replace the carpet.”
Eventually, Rainey gave up trying to get his deposit back. The whole situation was taking an emotional toll. With little hope of success from a legal system that had failed so many other tenants, Rainey recognized that he had to let go of his anger, recognize the deposit as a lost cause, and move on with his life.
Months later, the Boomerang article reignited his ire.
“The $600 is not an insignificant amount of money to me — it’s a good chunk of change,” Rainey said. “But I wanted justice. I felt wronged. And then once I found out he was doing it to other people, then I figured somebody needs to stand up. I felt like he was getting away with this and taking advantage of people who are probably down on their luck. These are dumpy places, so he knows people probably don’t have the resources to take him to court, or even have the motivation or time to figure out how to peruse this convoluted system.”
Rainey also said he finds it outrageous that Albany County Sheriff’s deputies were unable to serve Bossarei, given that Rainey saw Bossarei at the motel just about every single day.
Rainey called into the Feb. 2 council meeting to comment, but the mayor prevented him from directly discussing Stalder’s involvement in the issue. Rainey instead spoke around the issue as best he could and suggested the councilors check out the article if they hadn’t already.
At first, Rainey made excuses for Stalder, too, wondering how much she even knew about Bossarei’s business. Hearing about her role in the horrific tales of other former tenants, Rainey said he’s done being charitable.
Feeling there was no path to true justice in his case, Rainey adopted a different tack.
He texted Bossarei a link to the story, musing that there might be no such thing as bad press, before adding, “then again, maybe there is.”
He also offered his public comment at the council meeting.
“My objective was basically to embarrass Stalder,” he said. “That was more for me than it was for reforming Laramie rental policy, although that would be a great outcome. If this is the closest thing I get to justice — to make her squirm a little bit amongst her peers — so be it.”
Rainey said he hates to be “vengeful like that,” and admits that his is not the ideal course of action. A better outcome would involve a legal system that inspires hope for wronged tenants, rental regulations that prevent these events from occurring in the first place, and the return of his and others’ held deposits.
But Rainey, like most of Bossarei’s former tenants, felt powerless in the face of a legal system that has done little to alleviate their plight.
Stalder did not reply to a request for comment for this story, but her earlier public statement about the original article details her role as a Laramie City Councilor.
“I am mindful of my civic responsibility as a council member,” Stalder writes. “I take my duties very seriously. From time to time, I have recused myself due to a personal conflict on matters before the council. I will continue to do that.”
Stalder garnered attention last summer for reluctantly recusing herself from a vote regarding law enforcement. The city council was discussing police oversight in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and local marches for police accountability that took place in Laramie throughout the summer.
Activists and some councilors were seeking to establish a civilian oversight board. Stalder introduced an amendment to alter that oversight group, reducing civilian involvement by making it an ad-hoc committee of the council and suggesting the oversight board include police officers.
Stalder is the daughter of Laramie Police Department Chief Dale Stalder.
Only after outcry from angry members of the public present at the meeting did Councilor Stalder recuse herself from the vote.
“As an elected official, if several people in a meeting say I should recuse myself from the vote, even though I don't think there's a reason to do so, I will recuse myself," the councilor said at the time. “Either way, I appreciate the chance to speak and to humanize police officers. I hope after this dialogue we can see our Laramie police officers as individuals."
And Jessica Stalder did not recuse herself for a 2019 vote regarding rental regulations. She joined the narrow majority of the council that voted down a motion to further consider regulations. While the motion itself only sought to examine the issue further, it could have led to concrete regulations such as periodic inspections and licensing requirements.
Stalder closed her letter to the editor with a quote popularly attributed to Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. When you know better, you do better.”
She connects this to her own stated ignorance on the treatment of tenants described by the original article.
“Now that I am aware, I have encouraged Max to respond to the issues raised by his tenants and I understand he will be taking steps to do that,” Stalder writes in both her Facebook post and letter to the editor.
In her letter to the editor, Stalder writes she “would welcome a conversation with any that may have concerns,” although she adds on Facebook that she “will not respond to unfounded and unsupported personal attacks made on social media.”
The Laramie City Council has not discussed the original Laramie Boomerang article or its details directly. As of yet, the council has not scheduled time to reexamine rental regulations. But it could be a topic councilors eventually take up, given that newly seated members such as Sharon Cumbie voiced their interest in doing so during a recent meeting regarding city and county priorities.
Whether or not the council explicitly addresses Stalder’s connection to Bossarei, most former tenants are hoping that the city government revisits rental regulations. Gordon said she hopes Laramie landlords will one day be prevented from treating tenants the way she and her husband were.
“I know Wyoming is not big on regulation, and I know a lot of landlords have come here because of the lack of regulation — to be slumlords, or to be more successful with fewer overhead costs,” she said. “Basically, there’s just this huge open doorway that’s created by the lack of local legislation. And landlords from out of state have come and really exploited it, at the expense of Wyoming residents. This is a problem the council absolutely needs to do something about.”
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