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Building collapse// concert fire // History repeats, repeats, repeats

Meanwhile in Alameda, a small island city separated by a channel from Oakland they are having controversy over a fire chief:

East Bay Times said:
Vella and Oddie allegedly wanted Keimach to pick Domenick Weaver, a union leader and an Alameda fire captain. Instead, she picked Edmond Rodriguez, the chief of the Salinas Fire Department, saying he was more qualified.

The charter puts all hiring decisions for key personnel in the hands of the city manager. Council interference is prohibited and can be grounds for removal from office.

Rodriguez will start work Nov. 13. He takes over from Doug Long, who is retiring after serving as chief since 2015.

The chief’s job pays about $265,000 annually.

In an Oct. 2 letter to the council, or the day before announcing that Rodriguez was her pick, Keimach said she was subjected to “unseemly” and “intense and unrelenting” pressure to go with the candidate who was favored by the local firefighters union.

She also said her job evaluation had been continually postponed since March, a delay that she said made it appear as if a positive evaluation hinged on who she selected as chief.

Kern said her goal is to have an outside investigator identified by the end of this week to review Keimach’s allegations.

While Kern said she would recommend that Keimach’s job evaluation again get postponed until after the investigation, Kern also said it was up to the council to decide whether to go forward with it.¹
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Note the last chief only worked two years to spike his pension to double his salary, whether it's the union's pick or the city manager's pick both men will only have to work about two years to double their salaries starting their pensions.


¹ http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/10...-probe-allegations-involving-council-members/
 
It looks like the city is going to pay:

East Bay Times said:
OAKLAND — Oakland may have had a duty to enforce building and fire codes at the Ghost Ship warehouse, according to a significant court ruling that could eventually leave the city liable for 36 deaths in the horrific Dec. 2 fire.

The Nov. 8 decision by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman pierces through broad immunities protecting California cities from civil lawsuits in which workers botched inspections of a building or failed to perform the inspection at all.

In his tentative ruling, Seligman cited the allegations by attorneys for the families of the victims and said their civil lawsuit “exhaustively” documented the dangerous conditions of the Fruitvale district artist collective:

“The plaintiffs allege the city ‘knew in advance’ of the fire of various unpermitted uses and dangers, including a ‘likely risk of fire’ and that ‘in the evert (sic) of a fire occupants of the building were likely to die or suffer serious bodily injury due to the many violations of mandated building codes and safety provisions, all of which the city was aware of and required to enforce at all relevant times,’” Seligman wrote.

Stay up to date on East Bay news by downloading our mobile app for free. Get it from the Apple app store or the Google Play store.

The ruling wasn’t on the merits of the plaintiffs’ complaint but overruled a demurrer filed by the city of Oakland in opposition to the lawsuit. The judge said at this point, all allegations have to be considered until the facts of the case are argued. City spokeswoman Karen Boyd referred questions to the City Attorney’s Office, which did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Records show Oakland police, firefighters and building inspectors visited the warehouse before the December inferno, sometimes going inside the labyrinth-like collective stuffed with pianos and a maze of extension cords where more than 20 people illegally lived.¹
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A demurer is just a preliminary motion in which, in this case, the city is trying to get out of the lawsuit on the grounds that it is protected by sovereign immunity, but soverien immunity is gradually breaking down, cities are the deepest pockets around and that's what they are going for. When I went to law school Judge Seligman was a classmate, the first day of class we were asked what kind of law we wanted to practice, most young people said the big money was in environmental law, Seligman said the big money was going to be in womens' law, he broke Lucky Stores ahd then followed his dream to get rich destroying Wal Mart, he got Wal Mart all the way to the Supreme Court and lost, one more liberal judge and he would have won. BTW, I said I was a builder and didn't intend to practice law, I was just getting a law degree to navigate all the corrupt building and zoning precesses in order to get permits to build.


¹ http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11...andatory-duty-to-ensure-safety-at-ghost-ship/
 
I had to testify for my jurisdiction in a trip and fall on some telescoping bleachers a few years back. The City prevailed, but the one thing that our attorney kept pounding into my head before testifying was, if we fail the test of "known, or should have known", we could be held liable.

Kind of sounds like they are knocking on that door.........
 
Another thing you have to take into consideration is California has "comparative liability", an old high school buddy made case law and didn't even know it, he was unconscious in a hospital throughout the legal proceedings, he recovered and I later saw him at a school reunion and told him about it.

The facts were: He was living in the mountains and took his girlfriend to a bar one evening, they both got drunk but someone determined that he was more drunk than she was so it was decided that she drive home. She had few assets and only had legal minimum insurance (I think$35,000) and drove through a barricade on a winding mountain road, she was relatively unscathed but he was seriously injured, the jury came back with her 98% liable, the barricade manufacturer 1% liable, and the county also 1% liable for lack of maintenance on the road, her insurance company tendered policy limits, the barricade manufacturer tendered policy limits, so the county was stuck for the rest of the judgment, many millions for his injuries even though they were only found to be 1% liable, that's comparative liability for you, the one with the money pays.
 
conarb said:
Another thing you have to take into consideration is California has "comparative liability", an old high school buddy made case law and didn't even know it, he was unconscious in a hospital throughout the legal proceedings, he recovered and I later saw him at a school reunion and told him about it.

The facts were: He was living in the mountains and took his girlfriend to a bar one evening, they both got drunk but someone determined that he was more drunk than she was so it was decided that she drive home. She had few assets and only had legal minimum insurance (I think$35,000) and drove through a barricade on a winding mountain road, she was relatively unscathed but he was seriously injured, the jury came back with her 98% liable, the barricade manufacturer 1% liable, and the county also 1% liable for lack of maintenance on the road, her insurance company tendered policy limits, the barricade manufacturer tendered policy limits, so the county was stuck for the rest of the judgment, many millions for his injuries even though they were only found to be 1% liable, that's comparative liability for you, the one with the money pays.
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It's the same here, 1% at fault means you can pay 100% of the damages in tort cases. This places a significant amount of responsibility on governments to be able to prove that they were not negligent in their actions, unlike criminal law, they accept that the injuries occurred or building was damaged as prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. We have to prove through documentation that what we did was what a reasonably diligent official would have done.

I would agree with fatboy that this would be difficult to prove in this situation. I'm glad it's not me. We went from having multiple lawsuits per year to not having one in the 7 years I've worked for my department. I'd like very much to keep that up.
 
tmurray said:
I would agree with fatboy that this would be difficult to prove in this situation. I'm glad it's not me. We went from having multiple lawsuits per year to not having one in the 7 years I've worked for my department. I'd like very much to keep that up.
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From a legal standpoint it appears to me that AHJs should refocus their code enforcement to older existing buildings, I know the money is in new permits but you have to balance incoming money stream with risk management. If and when these cases go to trial one juror who has been given a ticket for parking in a handicapped zone will influence the other jurors to throw the book at the AHJ on the basis that their priorities are reversed.
 
Business owner, you need to correct these violations in your business.

No I don’t “ it’s the fault of the landlord and city poor oversight”


Ok that makes sense
 
Tony Serra and I lived a couple of doors apart as freshmen, Stanford Law School refused both of us early admission, telling us to finish our philosophy degrees and then they would admit us, we both were clean shaven with crew cuts then, after graduation I made the biggest mistake of my life by getting married, Tony took a couple of years off touring Europe then went to Bolt School of Law in Berkeley right in the Free Speech riots. 60 Minutes profiled him as the best anti-government attorney in the country, but he refuses to pay taxes to the "evil government", saying they use tax money to kill brown people with drones in the Middle East and kill black people in Chicago with entitlements. He's been in prison for tax evasion three times now, the last time he didn't take any income but the IRS imputed income to him based upon the value of his services, even the prosecutor argued at his sentencing that he be sentenced to training young public defenders instead of being sent back to prison but the judge said he had to learn to pay taxes. He has now agreed to take income but donate all income to the State Bar's program for the poor.

Maybe I can talk him into taking down the corrupt political codes?
 
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