Downtown building owners slowed by neighbors from meeting
earthquake safety standards will not get special treatment for
showing good will.
Gilroy – Downtown building owners slowed by neighbors from meeting earthquake safety standards will not get special treatment for showing good will.
Instead, in three years they will face the same $10,000 monthly fines looming over other owners of the 35 unreinforced masonry buildings in downtown Gilroy.
Officials hoped to craft a new law that would prevent fines against building owners who show “good faith,” while penalizing neighbors who drag their feet on renovations. But on Monday, city council members threw up their hands in frustration as they parsed the details.
The area is a jumble of old brick buildings connected by shared foundations, roofs and walls and renovations on about a third of the URM buildings could stall if neighbors fail to cooperate on upgrades. Complicating the situation are a handful of URM buildings attached to structures that do not require any improvements.
“We could go ad nauseam with this, but I don’t think it’s the city’s responsibility to cover every scenario,” City Councilman Peter Arellano said. “Let’s keep it simple.”
“Let them fight it out themselves” in court, Mayor Al Pinheiro concluded.
The only other prospect for building owners other than court is a solution that does not rely on a neighbor. And that could mean losing valuable square footage on a downtown building, according to Steve Ashford, a building contractor and owner of a downtown antique store.
He explained to council Monday night, for instance, that several downtown buildings on his block require upgrades but do not own one of their side walls.
“There’s no way he can do anything other than take a 20 foot wide building and reduce it to an 18 foot building, and then deed that (two-foot difference to the neighbor),” Ashford said. “We can’t go before the building department and say this is what we’re going to do, spend that money on the drawings, and then find out that we have to move the wall over. There has got to be some way to bring them to the table.”
Local government can’t drag people out of their buildings and force them to negotiate, City Administrator Jay Baksa said.
No other city in California has tried to craft an ordinance that differentiates between willing and unwilling building owners, he added. They simply set a deadline for upgrades, after which building owners face fines or so-called abatement – when the city steps in and takes legal steps to knock down a structure deemed unsafe.
Officials hope the prospect of lawsuits helps the city avoid that outcome.
“That has been the model of all the cities in the state of California,” Baksa said. “This would have been unique to us.
“What we’re saying is that the peer pressure of property owners often works too,” Baksa said.
Under a law approved late last year, owners of URM buildings have until the end of 2008 to perform upgrades, after which the city will start fining them $10,000 a month.
