Plumbers gone wild

A glitzy resort and a crumbling hotel create problems for a prominent labor union

By A.C. Thompson

acthompson@hushmail.com

The Civic Center Hotel, a five-story residential hotel at the junction of Market and 12th Streets in San Francisco, doesn't provide particularly elegant accommodations. The glass in the front door is spiderwebbed with cracks. In the lobby, the threadbare reddish carpet is grimy, and the wallpaper hangs in tatters. The building's tiny elevator has an unnerving habit of stopping in the wrong spot – often about half a foot below the intended floor.

But for all its flaws, the Civic Center has its supporters: the roughly 150 folks who dwell in the 90-year-old structure.

As far as SROs go, "it's one of the better places," says Christopher Dahl, who's lived at the Civic Center since 1999. "I want to live here. It's very convenient. I can walk to the supermarket. I have very convenient access to Muni." And, of course, the rent is cheap.

Perhaps the Civic Center's greatest asset is the fact that it's on a quiet, relatively pacific stretch of Market, away from the drug-saturated skid row craziness of 6th Street or the 16th and Mission dope zone.

At this point, though, it's not clear how much longer the building will exist. The Civic Center stands at the center of an ongoing – and grossly underreported – conflict involving renter-class plebes, a prominent labor union, city building inspectors, the ever-present threat of a major quake, and, tangentially, a juicy $36 million dollar lawsuit.

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From an office a couple doors down from the Civic Center, Pete Machi runs the pension fund of the United Association of Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Journeymen, Local 38. Machi says the hotel has been in the pension fund's hands for "at least 30 years."

And for at least 12 of those years, the city has been trying to get the pension fund to obey the law. City records indicate that the Department of Building Inspection, our local housing-code cops, has been pushing the plumbers to earthquake-proof the Civic Center since 1994. The hotel is constructed of bricks and mortar – "unreinforced masonry" in architectural jargon – which, understatement here, tend to fare poorly during quakes.

Today the building needs a million to two million dollars' worth of seismic retrofitting to bring it up to code – a massive overhaul the department is requiring the pension fund to complete by Feb. 16 or face fines of $500 a day.

"We're trying to comply with all the appropriate rules and regulations," Machi says. "We haven't reached any conclusion about how to approach the situation." In other words, the plumbers are about to blow the deadline. Work hasn't even begun on the retrofit.

As you might imagine, none of this sits well with the people living at the Civic Center. Standing in the hotel lobby near a bank of payphones, a trio of vending machines, and a graffiti-covered garbage can, Johnny I. Lewis, a 15-year resident who survives on a monthly disability check, doesn't mince words. "They're letting the building, and the tenants in it, go to hell," he gripes.

"As far as we're concerned, we're like a neighborhood behind the levees in New Orleans," says Dahl, 58. "I call this the Hotel Katrina."

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This isn't the first time there's been controversy about the way the pension fund handles its assets. In 2004, with little notice from the press, the federal government went after the fund – as well as plumbers union head Larry Mazzola and scores of other union figures – for allegedly mishandling at least $36 million in pension money.

The cash, according to a lawsuit filed by the US Department of Labor, was improperly siphoned from the pension fund and dumped into the Konocti Harbor Resort and Spa, a Lake County getaway spot partially owned by the plumbers union. It was, it seems, a very strange deal: The Labor Department says there were "no loan agreements, pledges of collateral, bonds," or any other paperwork documenting the arrangement. As far as Labor is concerned, fund managers essentially took money that belonged to the pensioners and workers still paying into the fund and poured the cash into an asset that didn't belong to them.

The case is ongoing, and neither Labor nor the pension fund's lawyers chose to comment for this story, though the fund and associated union officials have denied any wrongdoing in court documents. A look at the Konocti Harbor Web site shows that the 120-acre resort has a parade of washed-up musicians slated for the weeks ahead, including Heart, Eddie Money, Clint Black, Peter Frampton, and Hootie and the Blowfish.

Not surprisingly, the place, according to Labor, has been losing money for years.

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While the pension fund has allegedly pumped cash into a luxury resort, it doesn't seem inclined to spend money on the Civic Center. Rather, the fund has signaled a desire to raze the property, in documents filed with the Department of Building Inspection and in a public meeting.

Tenants think the pension fund is looking to do something more lucrative with a prime chunk of real estate. Dahl figures, "They want to get out of the SRO business. They just want us to go away."

Rooms in residential hotels are governed by the city's rent control ordinance, just like regular apartments, which means longtime Civic Center tenants will be grappling with a fat increase in the cost of shelter if the hotel goes. Larry Petit, 60, lives in a crowded 9-by-12-foot room without a kitchen. "Moving anywhere – even to another SRO – will double my rent," says Petit, who has been at the hotel for 20 years and pays $353 a month.

A former meatpacker who spent three years trying to organize a Nebraska beef plant, Petit now finds himself organizing tenants against a union pension fund. "It goes against my grain to be up against a union," he says, "but what the hell are they doing? Joe Hill is rolling over in his grave." On Jan. 19, Petit and more than 40 other hotel dwellers petitioned the rent board, essentially asking the body to punish the plumbers for failing to upgrade the collapse-prone building.

Over at the pension fund, Machi responds, "We're aware of their concerns, and we're trying to resolve this in the best interest of all parties. We realize there are obligations in terms of the SRO tenants." The fund, Machi acknowledges, is considering flattening the Civic Center, but because of city zoning rules, it may not be able to do so without replacing the lost housing, either in the same location or elsewhere.

Now the city's lawyers are getting involved. "We're investigating," says Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney's Office. "And we're working with the building's management to ensure compliance" with the law.

Emma Gerould, a tenant organizer who has worked with Civic Center residents and blogged on the issue on BeyondChron.org, says the city maintains a fund to help building owners pay for seismic upgrades. She doesn't understand why the plumbers haven't applied for the free money. As Gerould tells us, "There's going to be an earthquake. We know that. To leave the tenants here without doing the retrofit is unethical."

SFBG