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Were Shoddy Construction and Inspection Practices Responsible for Library Gardens Tragedy? (Public Comment)

John Bear
Wednesday June 17, 2015 - 12:32:00 AM

I am a citizen of Berkeley, CA, and outraged by what happened at Library Gardens. Although it is premature to speak in any certain way about the causes of this tragedy, one possible contributing cause may be shoddy construction and inspection practices that may have been ignored or possibly condoned during the construction and development boom that been taking place in the City of Berkeley over the past two decades. 

When I say “condoned,” I am making an inference from allegations of corruption made by various local media against various Berkeley City officials for their collusion with developers. These allegations center largely upon City inspectors who appear to have compromised their duties to provide fair, thorough, and impartial execution of their health and safety mandates. For example, in the years before and after 2006, when Library Gardens was constructed, there were numerous allegations and accounts in various local newspapers of predatory fire inspections and zoning enforcements by agents of the City, most frequently inspectors from the Berkeley Fire Department (BFD), of commercially desirable real estate on behalf of local developers. 

Particular attention focused on the developer Ali Kashani, who appeared to be working with Berkeley’s then planning chief, Mark Rhoades, who became Kashani’s partner immediately after being forced out of office by the public uproar created by the journalistic coverage of his apparent corruption. Public attention in the Rhoades-Kashani case focused on a pattern of predatory fire inspections upon commercial valuable locations sought by Mr. Kashani: in particular, the Drayage Building, Berkeley Iceland, and the Ghosh properties. There are doubtless others. More information is available at developmentshark.com, a website that has compiled links to much of this journalism and is devoted to exposing corrupt development practices in Berkeley. Needless to say, there is a great deal of antidevelopment sentiment in Berkeley. 

The question that now arises with the Library Gardens tragedy concerns the integrity of the building code inspection process in Berkeley: particularly, whether the predation by building safety inspectors on behalf of development interests turned into laxity when these same developers were engaged in their own construction projects. Hopefully there will be a thorough reexamination of the Library Garden’s construction practices. If dry rot on the balcony is determined to be the only problem at Library Gardens, then this may be an isolated failure of the inspection process. If the problem is found to be more systemic, then Library Gardens may be only the tip of a much larger iceberg. 

Berkeley Gardens was not a Kashani project. However, this does not mean that it did not benefit from a similar development climate. Mark Rhoades appears to have been part of a cabal of Berkeley City Officials in the fire, building, and zoning departments, possibly in conjunction with the City Attorney, Manuela Albuquerque, before she too was forced from office. However the practices appear to have continued and the cabal still seems to be operating with the blessing of Mayor Tom Bates, who might be characterized as a “small-town Rahm Immanuel.” His predecessor, Mayor Shirley Dean, may be interested in discussing these matters with you. She is certainly much more capable than I am to discuss the substance of these issues. A particularly good place to start any investigation into these matters would be the Berkeley Daily Planet. This publication and its editor, Becky O’Malley, have provided the most detailed coverage of these matters over the years, and I believe their entire archives are on line. 

It goes without saying that this catastrophe should not have happened. However, if what did happen happened as a consequence of larger pattern of negligence or corruption, then we should not restrict our investigations of dry rot to faulty maintenance. We should also be looking to follow this rot all the way to the top of the politics that permitted it.