Is My California Landlord Allowed To Charge Me A $50 Fee To Pay My Utilities?

Context: My landlord is responsible for paying the utilites. She does not live with my housemates and I (5 people). My landlord has been sending us emails that state the utility names with the prices with no evidence. It simply states "PG&E - $xxx.xx," etc. We started asking my landlord for photo proof due to very high utilty prices. After we pressed her for evidence, she would send photos taken from her phone with the invoice number, previous amounts paid, and contact information to talk to the utility places scratched out. It's very confusing for us to understand these pictures. Coincidentally, there were charges for the water/trash bill that had the same exact amount as the previous month according to the email, but we weren't there for half the month. We always have to push for her to send us pictures. She continued to scratch out the amount due, but left the utility period to be seen; again, we pressed her, and she sent the picture with the value unscratched this time, and yes, it did match up. It's very strange and peculiar that she would do that. The photo could be altered for all we know. She literally scratches out the amount and writes in her amount with the editing pencil feature sometimes.

She now wants to charge us $50 to sending over pictures of the utility bills. Is this even legal? I'm just shocked and appalled that she wouldn't even send us pictures of the utilities in the first place. We are the only ones that live on this property. I believe she is trying to charge us $50 for making her life "difficult."

She sent 4 links to articles to justify her being able to charge $50: 1, 2, 3, 4. The lease does not say anything at all about us having to pay extra money for her to send utility bills, nor does it say it denies us from seeing utility bills.

Additionally, according to the lease, we are to have cleaners to come every month (it explicitly says this), but she has been pushing back the date for the cleaners, and it has eventually become every 2 months. She stated that they will be coming every 2 months instead recently. We have told her per the lease, they are to come, but she does not acknowledge it and instead tells us when cleaners will be coming.

Furthermore, she wanted to charge us for a late fee regarding a false alarm from the security system. All the bills get sent to her so why do we have to pay a late fee that was her fault? We were able to void this by calling the city, and told her it was resolved. She then yelled at us for trying to take matters into our own hands, and that the city had no business telling us anything about the false alarm incident because it's not under our name. We are the residents, and when we asked her about the situation, she again, blamed it on us for setting off the alarm, insisting that someone had to come forward even after it was labeled as a false alarm from the police according to her. (We would have turned it off if the alarm went off; we're not stupid. We were simply not home.)

On top of that, she has been bullying us. We're very good tenants and whenever something goes wrong, she appears very accusatory and unreasonably. This is why we have distrust in her. She is a difficult landlord that comes into our house to pick up our checks (tells us 1 day ahead of time) and inspects the house (not our rooms), and moves things around because they are not to her liking. It does say on the lease that she is able to do that, but she's just an a-hole about it.

What can we do about this? We are scared of retaliation and she took 1.5x our monthly deposit (prior to July 2024). I will also be calling a free legal advisor in our city. We are students and are low-income. Are there any other resources? Sorry for the rambling, I'm livid that I deal with such an unreasonable landlord.