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HomeMy WebLinkAbout5/26/2026 Item 5a, Loew Michael Loew < To:E-mail Council Website Subject:5/26 Special Meeting, Item 5a public comment Mayor Stewart and Members of the City Council, I am the former Chief Building Official and Deputy Director who left the City of SLO in June 2025. I am submitting this comment to provide a more complete narrative about Code Enforcement, Safe Housing, and fraternity and sorority enforcement from while I was charged with overseeing the division. The report correctly states that Safe Housing enforcement is legally complex, time-intensive, and increasingly mandated by state law. It also correctly states that the Chief Building Official is the City’s designated code official and authority having jurisdiction for adopted building and safety codes, and that the Chief Building Official has citation authority under Penal Code section 836.5 as adopted by the City’s Municipal Code. However, it seems disingenuous to report this authority while the record does not reflect this level of enforcement in practice. Code Enforcement must be a transparent process as it relates to fiscal policy. The Council’s recently adopted fee study reflects that code enforcement is not a cost recoverable service. Therefore, by policy, we should accept that there is no expectation for this division to generate revenue through citations. At the same time, the report highlights how issuing citations is ineffective in gaining compliance. This should raise the question, how much is this actually costing the City? According to the report, code enforcement in the city of SLO seems to be primarily the act of opening a case, sending a courtesy letter, and waiting indefinitely. The report references administrative citations, but what has the city collected compared to its costs? If the Council chooses to spend public resources on a program from the General Fund, and it fails to produce outcomes, the Council should answer why they do not practice the level of enforcement that is cited in the staff report. A review of the Division’s record should reveal that it does not exercise prosecutorial authority to compel compliance, with exception to receiverships in two instances. If voluntary compliance fails, under what circumstances should enforcement move to notices, citations, inspection warrants, abatement, prosecution, receivership, or other lawful remedies as the facts require? Otherwise, if we cannot identify the process to the endpoint, compliance becomes optional. This is what this report seems to demonstrate but avoids saying. The report acknowledges that the City does not have evidence that the extensive effort to address fraternity and sorority land use violations has resulted in measurable change. That is not surprising to me because I never saw the City treat that initiative as a serious enforcement program. During my tenure, I raised concerns regarding the way fraternity and sorority enforcement was bypassing the Chief Building Official and being led by the Director. I was told this work was connected to the need to show evidence that the City was enforcing against fraternities and sororities while a Grand Jury matter was pending, and that the Grand Jury context was to be kept confidential. I raised further concerns that creating a paper trail of activity was not the same as enforcing the law, and that the strategy itself was resource-intensive and administratively flawed. 1 Knocking on doors several days after a party has occurred is not a meaningful enforcement strategy. Land use regulation cannot, by itself, stop students from partying in the street on St. Patrick’s Day. It cannot stop drunk and disorderly conduct as students move from house party to house party through residential neighborhoods. It cannot stop underage drinking in real time. Those are public safety, alcohol enforcement, public nuisance, and neighborhood management problems. Code Enforcement has a role, but it cannot be treated as the lead agency for problems it is structurally unable to solve. At the same time, if the City believes a property is operating as an unpermitted fraternity or sorority house, then the City can actually enforce. However, the report narrates an after-the-fact activity that is not producing measurable results, then later cites the failure of that approach as proof that enforcement is too burdensome. That same justification is also being used to explain why Safe Housing work has not become the proactive program Council directed it to be in October 2023. The report’s discussion of the Madonna Road Apartments operation is the clearest example. The report treats that example as proof that Safe Housing inspections are time-intensive, but the special operation actually took place in a manner of just one week. November 4th-8th, 2024. In June of 2024, there was a unit fire at the Madonna Road apartment complex. Earlier that day residents reported smoke and arcing from an outlet. Fire crews responded, the main breaker was turned off, and an electrician was called. It was reported that the outlet was tightened and power was restored, but the Building Division was not contacted. Later that evening, the unit caught fire. The displaced tenant was a single mother with four children who had recently moved into the apartment using Section 8 vouchers after years of housing instability. They were not an abstraction, but our neighbors, our children's peers, our community members too. They were a family who had finally found stability after experiencing years of homelessness, and they had their entire life in that unit. After the fire, maintenance personnel initially placed the family in an empty unit with air mattresses so they could get through the night. Then, in the middle of the night, the property manager removed them from that unit so it could be used for another displaced resident who was not on Section 8. The family spent the rest of the night in their car waiting for other social service providers who eventually put them in a motel out of town. The Building Division was not notified until the following Monday. When I sent an inspector to determine the extent of building-system and structural damage, the property manager denied us access, citing Fire Department instructions that no one should enter the unit. It took 4 days before Building staff were granted access. I later learned that the family had also been denied access to retrieve basic belongings, including clothing, computers, and personal documents that survived the fire. They had been living in a motel for over a week with nothing but what they escaped with. When I learned this, I immediately went to the property, contacted the emergency maintenance line at the complex, and instructed maintenance personnel to open the unit for the family. They did not deserve to lose their dignity. They had not lost their rights. They had not lost their legal interest in the unit simply because their apartment burned. And yet, while this family was trying to recover what remained of their lives, the City’s attention was also being pulled toward a possible arson narrative. I was deeply concerned by that because the technical evidence pointed to an electrical failure. Despite the fire inspector identifying the likely cause as electrical, and the Building Division finding conditions in the electrical panel that supported that conclusion, there was interest in investigating whether this family had caused the fire. The technical concern was never limited to one outlet or one unit. The complex contained discontinued Zinsco electrical panels known industry-wide as dangerous by design, and the Building Division observed conditions consistent with serious electrical safety concerns, including arcing, overheating, breaker failure, and fused- open breaker conditions. In a metal-conduit building system, those conditions create a potential building-wide life-safety risk. That was why broader inspection was necessary. 2 The property manager's initial response was not cooperative. Code Enforcement issued multiple requests for inspection. Those requests were ignored and I began preparing inspection warrants with the City Attorney’s Office. However, just before court involvement became necessary, corporate ownership responded. After I explained the technical concerns and the risk to residents, ownership acted quickly. The property manager was replaced, and ownership agreed to cooperate with the Building and Safety Division. What followed was not simply a large-scale inspection. It was a carefully planned Safe Housing operation designed to pilot a program based on the Council’s direction from the October 2023 study session. The plan included owner notice to residents, City notice through postcards in English and Spanish, a Code Enforcement mobile office on site with translation services available, electricians on site to make repairs the same day violations were identified, and building inspectors to sign off on work as it occurred. The operation successfully minimized disruption to residents, remediated immediate hazards, and demonstrated that enforcement can be collaborative, efficient, and focused on tenant safety and rights. In one week, the City inspected approximately 120 units and related electrical systems. Approximately 350 electrical violations were identified. Roughly 230 violations were corrected and inspected the same day. Most importantly, multiple imminent-danger electrical conditions were identified, including five instances of the same type of dangerous condition believed to have caused the original fire. Safe Housing Specialist Rami Salem did not go home the nights those violations were discovered until he saw that they were remediated. That is the story Council should be hearing. Madonna Road should not be used as an excuse for why Safe Housing work is difficult. It should be recognized as proof that Safe Housing enforcement works when the City commits to it. The operation produced measurable outcomes. It identified serious hazards. It corrected violations immediately. It protected tenants, and it demonstrated that owners can be compelled to cooperate when the City is willing to use its authority. I prepared an after-action report documenting the operation, the resources used, the violations found, and the compliance outcomes in preparation for the 25-27 budget cycle. However, I was told that the matter would not be brought back to Council until a future study session planned for next year. The operational problems referenced in the staff report regarding the open cases for work without permits were also known. Once a code case leads to a permit, the work should move primarily into the building inspection process. But because the Building Division had no effective process for enforcing expired permits, Code Enforcement cases often remained open while both a Code Enforcement Officer and a Building Inspector tracked the same matter, as outlined in the staff report. I attempted to correct this administrative inefficiency. The City had, on average, more than 250 expired permits each year, along with a backlog of roughly 2,000 expired permits over the prior five years. Those expired permits represented unfinished work, unresolved inspection obligations, and in some cases unverified life- safety conditions. They also represented recoverable enforcement revenue as the City Council just adopted an expired-permit fee. My proposal was operationally straightforward and fiscally responsible: increase Building Inspector pay by 2.5 percent to bring inspectors to the same level as Code Enforcement Officers, then assign Building Inspectors to enforce expired permits as part of the Building Division’s permit-compliance function. That would have created a clear internal handoff where Code Enforcement identifies the violation, the owner obtains a permit, and Building Inspectors ensure the permitted work is completed, inspected, and closed. The roughly $12,000 a year cost for the pay adjustment (About $4,000 per inspector) would have been offset by the revenue generated through expired-permit enforcement. More importantly, it would have reduced duplicated staff effort, improved permit compliance, and allowed Code Enforcement Officers to focus on active violations rather than monitoring permits that belonged in the building inspection workflow. 3 I also proposed establishing a Building Inspector on-call rotation. The cost was modest. The current labor agreement already has a clause for on-call services to pay employees $45 per day, and $65 per day on weekends and holidays: less than $20,000 a year. This would have provided a meaningful benefit to an already underpaid inspection team while improving the City’s ability to respond after fires, unsafe conditions, emergency repairs, and tenant displacement events. Madonna Road showed exactly why that matters. When fires involve electrical systems, structural damage, habitability impacts, or displaced tenants, the Building Official is the statutory authority charged with the responsibility of making consequential decisions affecting real lives. Council should be careful not to accept a narrative that turns inaction into inevitability. Safe Housing did not stall because the law is complex. It stalled because the City did not allow the program to mature from outreach into enforcement. Fraternity and sorority enforcement did not fail because enforcement is impossible. It failed because the City pursued activity without a coherent enforcement process. So the issue is not simply “rising workload.” The issue is that enforcement in the City is measurably performative. Sincerely, Michael Loew 4