For the past year, Gilroy Mayor Don Gage and Council Member Perry Woodward have been individually meeting with owners of downtown’s 18 unreinforced masonry buildings and city staff. The pair claimed a victory this month; two buildings have been officially taken off the list of structures deemed unfit to survive a high magnitude earthquake after sufficient retrofitting.
Owners of the remaining 16 URM buildings, regardless of any progress they may be making toward completion of the project, are being fined $1,000 a month until the work required by Gilroy’s homegrown seismic safety ordinance is complete. Under the ordinance, penalties stop when the maximum accrual—$15,000—is reached.
As part of a toughened stance in June 2013, city council voted 4-3 to impose liens of $10,000 a month on URM building owners delinquent on administrative citations to force noncompliant owners—who often don’t reside in Gilroy—to come to the table.
That punitive tactic worked, according to Gage, as a majority of 18 property owners have since met with staff and worked out a timeline for when repairs and retrofits will be completed.
“We have 15 buildings that are in some phase of completion,” Gage said. “They’ll be coming off the list (of URM properties) within the next year.”
The problem of getting the remaining noncompliant owners to the table still exists, though. Three URM owners have yet to speak with city staff on how they plan to fix their properties, according to Gage.
Many URM owners and city officials agree the face-to-face meetings have helped created a better understanding of each individual situation. Through the discussions, Gage and Woodward have learned the city didn’t face one URM problem but 18 problems that need attention.
“Having that discussion and understanding where people are coming from has been very productive, as opposed to sitting there and wondering why nothing is getting fixed,” Woodward said.
But some downtown URM owners like Steve Ashford are concerned the city’s approach has become more centered on punishment.
Ashford points to the fact that his monthly fines are continuing to accrue—despite adhering to a deadline of March 2015 to complete all necessary retrofits to his building.
According to Gage, the fines may be waived at some point in the future by city council, depending on whether each URM owner is compliant and completes a retrofit in a timely manner. But there are no guarantees; a majority of the council must agree on whether accrued fines are waived on a case-by-case basis.
“There’s a stick and a carrot,” Woodward said. “There are the fines, but there’s the prospect we’re there to help them and, if appropriate, remove the fines.”
Lately, a new tactic has come into play—the threat of eminent domain. Woodward broke down a recent example of two URM owners who shared a common wall. One owner was reluctant to start work on fixing the property, while the other was eager to get the job done.
Recalling what he told both property owners, Woodward said he’d recommend the city take both properties via eminent domain if the problem wasn’t resolved. He posited that if the city owned both sides, maybe the common wall would be fixed.
“Lo and behold, they came to an agreement,” Woodward said. “We are getting things fixed.”
URM designation leads to difficulty finding financing
All retrofits on URM buildings must be completed at the owner’s expense. With dwindling revenue, inability to find sufficient financing and little to no rent available given URM buildings by nature are unsafe to occupy, it’s hard to get repairs done in the first place, Ashford said.
Because of the blighted downtown buildings—often vacant or abandoned and unsafe by Gilroy’s standards—URM property owners find it nearly impossible to secure loans to complete the work city officials require before the buildings themselves can be occupied.
“People don’t know what to do,” Ashford added. “Some owners are like deer caught in the headlights.”
The cycle of being buried beneath accruing fines—and at the same time unable to generate sufficient rent from a tenant to fund any construction—is exactly what some URM owners like Gary Walton say is hindering downtown from moving past the decades-old problem.
According to Walton, Gilroy did not do nearly enough research on how to tackle the long-standing URM problem. He points to the city of Oakland, which reportedly studied eight different scenarios to deal with URMs and the specific approach implemented by Gilroy “had the least chance of success because it was too expensive,” Walton said.
As a result, Walton says property values have taken a hit, rent has increased and the overall look of the downtown area has suffered.
But if a catastrophic earthquake rocked Gilroy, passersby struck by debris tumbling from a URM building would be suffering even more, city officials retort.
Gage says the city could potentially shoulder the liability if someone is hit by URM debris.
“Even though the property owner owns it, if it ends up in the street and kills somebody, they’re going to go after the deep pockets,” Gage said.
But Jose Montes, a URM owner, says city staffers seem more focused on his doors and windows over the past year-and-a-half—where his architectural and site plan has been sitting in limbo—than the structural stability of his property. Neither the stability of windows or doors fall under the purview of Gilroy’s seismic safety ordinance.
Montes is willing to work with the city, but he said he repeatedly gets shut down at every step of the way and claims the city is unnecessarily complicating things.
“It’s not life and safety; it’s beautification,” he said. “Those changes have nothing to do with the integrity of the building.”
