Bob Blach, an inspector with the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, shines his flashlight along the exposed ceiling of a West Atherton home under construction. He’s following the path of the water pipes that feed the fire-suppression sprinklers snaking through a house of palatial proportions.
A couple of contractors, attempting to appear nonchalant, are waiting to find out if the project will pass the inspection. They are understandably anxious — construction has been held up three months because the nearby fire hydrant didn’t provide enough water flow to protect the almost 12,000 square-foot house and its outbuildings.
Fifteen hundred feet of new water line and $200,000 later, the water flow has gone from an unacceptable 900 gallons per minute to the minimum requirement of 1,500 gallons per minute, but the house is still months away from completion.
Next door, construction on an equally big house is nearly done. Work on both houses started at the same time, the contractor says. The difference is that no one required the builders of the house next door to do anything about water flow from the fire hydrant, he says.
The house months from completion had its plans reviewed by the Menlo Park Fire Protection District. The house that’s nearly done did not. Both houses are served by the same hydrant.
“The fire district did deny the permit for (the house) and the (Atherton) building department had approved it,” says Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman. “There’s no way in the world that project had adequate water flow for what we needed to have.”
This type of discrepancy forms the crux of the concerns expressed in last week’s report from the San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury about Atherton’s building department. The interim report calls for immediate action to remedy health and safety issues in the town’s residential construction projects, stemming from the building department’s management problems under former building official Mike Hood.
“I am very concerned for both the safety of residents of the town of Atherton and our firefighters,” said Chief Schapelhouman.
While fire officials are alarmed, some Atherton officials are hot under the collar over the report and the fire district’s reaction.
Mayor Alan Carlson said he doesn’t think the situation is serious at all.
Just because the fire district didn’t review all the building plans that came through the Atherton Building Department doesn’t mean that the projects weren’t reviewed for health and safety issues by the town’s own building department, he says.
“That’s what’s irritating — the implication that fire hazards were built in Atherton, and that’s absolutely not the case,” Mr. Carlson says.
Building department imbroglio
Atherton’s small but busy building department has been under heavy scrutiny for the past year, and not just from the civil grand jury. A private investigator conducted an eight-month personnel investigation, and the town’s finance department conducted a three-phase audit of the building department’s procedures and practices, including a review of permits issued and project records. Some permits were issued improperly and some projects violated the town’s municipal code, according to the audit’s findings.
In the midst of all the scrutiny, longtime building official Mike Hood retired.
As a result, a number of reforms have been put in place or are in the process of being instituted in the building department, at the direction of the Atherton City Council. The grand jury report supports the audit’s findings and the town’s reforms, but adds a new chapter to the building department saga — the possibility that fire safety standards were not met by some of the projects.
Doubts raised
Because of the problems uncovered by the finance department’s audits, the civil grand jury concludes that “some projects in the town were not covered by the (audits) and may violate the health and safety standards in the 2001 California Building Code and Health and Safety Code.”
The key point raised in the report is that Atherton had no established procedure for having building plans reviewed by the fire protection district. “The permit applicant had been responsible for submitting the plans to the (fire district),” the report says, referring to it as a “loophole in the permitting process.”
Of the list of open building permits in Atherton, fewer than half of the substantial construction and building alteration projects had been reviewed or approved by the fire district, the report says. The report says only 18 of 81 new residences and 45 of 108 accessory structures were submitted for district review.
Building department officials say they are in the midst of conducting their own tally of the open permits.
“I was most distressed to discover that many building plans were not given to the fire department and hence, did not get properly reviewed,” says Peter Carpenter, an Atherton resident and a member of the fire district’s elected board of directors.
“Of the building plans that were not reviewed, how many have problems?” he says. “There’s the possibility that of those plans that were not sent, they were put together by good architects and had all the features that are required, but you don’t know until you look.”
A closer look is exactly what the grand jury is recommending — that the town go through all building plans submitted during former building official Mike Hood’s 11-year tenure, and send to the fire district all the projects that “were not reviewed for fire safety.”
No one knows exactly how many building projects that would be, but estimates range from several hundred to more than a thousand building plans that the grand jury wants reviewed by April 1.
Both Atherton and fire district officials questioned the feasibility of reviewing so many plans in such a short amount of time.
City Manager Jim Robinson says Atherton residents can be reassured that construction projects were all reviewed for compliance with the California Building Code for life safety and other issues.
The town began working more closely with fire district officials when Mike Cully came on board as the interim building official in late fall.
As of last week, all building plans submitted to the Atherton Building Department were being sent to the fire district, according to the town’s new building official, Mike Wasmann. Until a formal agreement is made with the fire officials, some time in the near future, the town will leave it up to the district’s fire prevention bureau to decide which plans to review, he says.
Atherton is different
Of a survey of seven other communities in San Mateo County, including three comparable to Atherton in population and demographics, all of them required permit applications be approved by the fire department before a building permit is issued, according to the grand jury report.
While some communities, such as Menlo Park, exempt residential construction from fire department review, Atherton presents a fairly unique set of challenges.
Atherton homes are on large lots, typically an acre or larger, and may be set back far from the road. Chief Schapelhouman said firefighters face three types of problems in Atherton: getting access to the home; proximity to fire hydrants; and having an adequate water supply.
Entrance gates and long driveways may be too narrow to accommodate fire engines in some cases, Chief Schapelhouman says. Inadequate water flow is a problem common to many Atherton neighborhoods, and houses may be set back so far from the street that it takes three fire engines’ worth of hose line to reach from the hydrant to the building, he says.
For the past several years, it’s become de rigueur to include a full basement underneath a new home. And of course, Atherton homes are much larger than those of a typical suburban subdivision.
“We have houses that, in some cases, are larger than commercial establishments, and in some cases, may have almost as many people going through them,” says Councilwoman Kathy McKeithen. “You want firefighters to be safe. They can get lost in one of these big houses, they can get lost in the basements. I sympathize with their concerns.”
While homeowners may enjoy the bonus square footage they get from basements, firefighters generally have a less favorable view.
“The worst situation we can face is to have a fire in a substructure level,” says Chief Schapelhouman, citing the danger of collapse and the possibility of inadequate exits.
Real dangers?
Atherton’s former interim building official, Mike Cully, says he does not know of any Atherton basements that lack exits or sprinklers, despite the allegations in the grand jury report.
“If they’re talking about existing structures, if they were legal when they were built, then they are still legal today. Any basements built today are in compliance with the California Building Code,” he says.
Mr. Cully stepped down as building official on Feb. 5, when Mr. Wasmann took over the job, and he is now filling Mr. Wasmann’s former post as senior building inspector, on an interim basis.
In fact, town officials say they are only aware of one property that may have run afoul of the town’s two-year-old sprinkler ordinance, and that is for a guest cottage with a basement under it. Depending on how the square footage is calculated, the cottage could be considered large enough to trigger the sprinkler requirement, says City Attorney Marc Hynes.
Atherton recently clarified its rules, and prohibits basements under accessory structures.
“The houses in our town are safe, they’re not falling apart, and they’re not going to burst into flames on their own,” says Mr. Cully.
The grand jury report cites two properties that violate the Atherton municipal code and that appear to present health and safety violations. Apart from the problematic guest cottage, Mr. Hynes says he has no idea which properties the report is referring to.
“The things that turned up were violations of the zoning code, and no one’s going to die from zoning code violations,” he says, using the example of homes built bigger than they were supposed to be.
More questions
At the moment, it appears unlikely that the Atherton City Council will fulfill the grand jury’s request for 11-years-worth of building plans to be reviewed by the fire district.
“I don’t know that we need to go back over Mike Hood’s entire record,” says Councilwoman McKeithen. “How they’re going to do it by April 1 is beyond me.”
Considering the state of the Building Department’s records, which are kept on an antiquated DOS system that dates back to 1985, Mr. Cully predicted that it would take a couple of IT guys at least a couple of weeks just to come up with all of the records.
Even if the fire district’s busy, four-man prevention bureau could review all of the plans in time, it raises still more questions. The district charges property owners several hundred dollars to recover its costs for reviewing plans and doing inspections.
“On a normal day, we would charge a fee and offset our cost, but because these ships have already sailed, that’s not possible,” says Chief Schapelhouman. “We’re talking about a tremendous commitment of personnel time, and obviously, of district funding for this endeavor.”
The grand jury report does not indicate who would have to pay for the district’s retroactive plan reviews. And, it doesn’t indicate who would pay to fix any problems that might be found.
“Who would pay for it, and what would you do about it? Unless you found life safety issues, people got permits, people relied on them, and vested their rights — there’s no way you could force them to do anything,” says Mr. Hynes, the city attorney. “I suppose if something was so poorly constructed that it’s at risk of collapse or risk of fire, you could go back (and force a remedy). But I haven’t seen any examples of that.”
Blindsided by report
Just when Atherton officials had thought they’d heard almost everything there was to hear about problems in the building department, out came last week’s grand jury report with its focus on fire safety.
Mayor Carlson says he had absolutely no idea where the concerns about fire safety originated.
“Did I see this issue coming? No,” he says. “We never had anyone come in and allege that a building did not meet health and safety and fire standards.”
In fact, there’s a bit of finger-pointing over the whole issue of the fire district’s involvement in reviewing plans. Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hynes maintain that the town was perfectly within its rights to bypass the fire district’s review of single-family homes and delegate that authority to Atherton’s building official.
Mr. Hynes says that several years ago, the town offered fire district inspectors a desk at the planning department where they could review plans, but that they declined. Rather than delay building plan reviews for several weeks by first sending them out to the fire district, the town conducted its own safety reviews, he says.
Mr. Cully, who has a background as a fire inspector, says he met with Fire Marshal Jeff Aus in October to discuss the district’s concerns, and the topic of plan reviews never came up. It wasn’t until December that he discovered that Atherton didn’t have a formal procedure in place for getting the fire district to sign off on appropriate projects. He says he then began drafting a procedure, which was completed Feb. 5, in order to keep the district in the loop.
“The building official has tremendous power and tremendous oversight, if he wants to work with us or if he doesn’t want to work with us,” says Chief Schapelhouman. “This may have been solved had we approached the council as was done with the sprinkler ordinance.”
Mr. Carpenter, the fire district director, points to a bigger problem the fire district faces from all three of the towns it serves — Atherton, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto.
“In my opinion, the three underlying jurisdictions have tended to view the fire department as not part of their team. The fire department is not routinely asked for input,” he says. “To some degree, I think that’s a very short-sighted, bureaucratic attitude.”
Going forward
People with building projects shouldn’t be worried that their plan reviews are going to be delayed, now that Atherton is sending plans to the fire district, says Mr. Cully.
Because of the Building Department’s heavy workload, and the complexity of doing full structural reviews of building plans, the fire district has a much shorter turnaround time for its plan reviews than the building department does, he says. Plans can get reviewed by the district and get back to the town in the same amount of time they would’ve been waiting in the queue for the town’s plan check, Mr. Cully says.
Mr. Blach, the fire district’s inspector, says Menlo Park’s fire prevention bureau is very customer friendly.
“In other places, you’d be waiting three months for review. We’re kicking plans off in three weeks,” he says.
And despite questions about who should have spoken up about fire safety plans, fire district and Atherton officials interviewed by the Almanac for the story all say that they intend to work cooperatively from now on.
“We have a new building official and a new fire chief, and I’m confident we can work together to resolve common issues relative to plan checking and review in the town of Atherton,” says City Manager Robinson.
The town is making great strides in improving the building department, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to do, and that the fire district isn’t right about its concerns, says Ms. McKeithen.
How other towns handle building plan reviews
The county civil grand jury’s report criticizes the Atherton Building Department for not having a formal procedure in place for having building plans reviewed by the Menlo Park Fire Protection District. Other towns in the Almanac circulation area have these procedures:• Menlo Park: Multi-family and commercial projects are reviewed by the fire district, but single-family homes and remodeling projects are not.
• Portola Valley: Fire marshal review is required of plans for both new construction and remodels to check for water supply and access, and an inspection is required before Architecture and Site Control Commission approval of a project.
• Woodside: New construction over 1,000 square feet, major remodeling projects, driveways and gates are reviewed by the fire marshal.
Grand jury recommends
The San Mateo County civil grand jury recommends that the town of Atherton and its City Council:• Ask the fire district examine all current, substantial construction projects for potential health and safety violations.
• Ask the fire district examine all projects “that were not reviewed for fire safety” constructed during the 11 years Mike Hood served as Atherton’s building official.
• Publish the results of these examinations by April 1, 2007.
• Adopt an ordinance defining when fire district approval of building construction plans is required before a permit may be issued.
• Reconsider the fire sprinkler ordinance that exempts remodeling and other building alteration projects from the sprinkler ordinance and from fire district approval.
• Continue to implement the reforms recommended in the audits of the Atherton Building Department.
To read the civil grand jury’s entire report on Atherton’s building department, go to SanMateoCourt.org/grandjury and click on “Final reports” for 2006-2007.
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