A months-long battle over reform of the city's rent control laws could be close to a resolution thanks to talks commenced between City Councilman Stephen Hudock and rent control activists last week. Hudock said last week that the legal department is looking at the wording of a proposal that both sides can agree on. He said that talks made him believe that "everybody was on the same wavelength." If a compromise can be hammered out, another Hudock proposal that is slated for council action Wednesday night would probably be pulled from the agenda. That proposal, like three others that the at-large councilman has forwarded in recent months on the issue, has drawn the fire of tenants' rights activists who have called it "a virus" that eventually could lead to the death of the city's original 1973 rent control law. But Thursday, it appeared that the two sides may have found common ground. "We all want to eliminate as many loopholes as possible," Hudock said in a phone interview Thursday evening. "We want to make it hard for landlords to skirt this law." Daniel Tumpson, a longtime activist who has played a leading role in the debate, did not return phone calls before press time, but a source that has worked with Tumpson to block Hudock's reforms confirmed that the two sides were talking and close to an agreement. The meeting, which included Tumpson, Hudock, Rent Control Stabilization Bureau Chief Carole McLaughlin, and city lawyers, came after months of often acrimonious debate over the city's 1973 rent control law, which prohibits landlords from raising rents by more than a few percentage points a year. The reforms that were brought up by the council months ago do not pertain to most of the buildings in town. However, they do pertain to certain low- and moderate-income developments whose rents have been regulated by the federal government for decades. The government soon will relinquish control, leaving many to wonder whether the buildings will now come under the city's rent control law. Hudock said earlier this year that his measure was actually intended to protect tenants. It came up after city lawyers informed him that tenants who live in Clock Towers, a downtown apartment building constructed for low- and moderate-income families, could face much higher rents in the near future. Hudock responded by drawing up a complicated reform ordinance in March that would have brought a percentage of the units in the buildings under rent control and made a number of other changes to the law. The ordinance drew objections from activists because it also included several other provisions that would have allowed various classes of landlords to raise rents once their current tenants left. Although that reform passed the council, it was ultimately repealed after activists gathered more than 1,800 signatures opposing the new law. Since then, Hudock has stripped his proposal of the controversial vacancy decontrol language that drew the ire of the activists originally, and reintroduced three rent control reform bills that would protect the tenants in the buildings in question. Two of those reforms were pulled to make "technical corrections," and the third was scheduled for debate Wednesday night. If it passes, activists say they will gather the signatures to kill it too. But if both sides can come to an agreement, Tumpson will not have to stand out on the corner in front of the PATH station gathering signatures and Hudock won't have to argue with the activists. "We have two interpretations of the same language," Hudock explained Thursday. "Anytime you start touching something, it can become tricky. You don't want to open up more problems. There were parts in our ordinance taken from Washington D.C.'s ordinance that did not fit us, so we took it out. But right now we are working with each other and drawing on each other's strengths."