December 2016
Ghost Ship fire: One group’s experience highlights Oakland’s heavy-handed approach for artist spaces
OAKLAND — Oakland’s top building official last week sent city employees to shut down the Omni Commons, home to a collection of artists, hackers, educators and activists — but not for any concerns over safety or the illegal conversion of a warehouse into housing.
Rather, the alleged violation hinged on two words written on an obscure insurance map dating to 1951, which Tim Low, a senior engineer and the city’s acting building official, used as evidence the structure had, at some point, undergone a change of use, which automatically necessitates the building come up to modern fire and building codes.
The space is saved for now, but Omni founding member David Keenan said the experience calls into question public statements from Mayor Libby Schaaf that city officials would not be conducting a “witch hunt” and would be using “compassion” in their handling of fire and code enforcement complaints. Those types of complaints spiked in the two weeks after the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood earlier this month.
Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan called the city’s treatment of the Omni “outrageous” and “Trumpian.”
“Why is the administration directing senior level staff to go digging through old maps to find a technical detail that has nothing to do with life safety?” Kaplan said. “What we need to fix are the actual fire dangers.”
The space was used as a nightclub, called the Omni Club, from 1987 to 1993, when a videotape of a bottle-throwing melee prompted its closure. In 2013, a coalition of disparate groups came together as the Omni Commons to rent the space and host public performances and other functions. Earlier this month Keenan said the groups finally had pooled enough money over the years to collectively purchase the building.
Because the space has operated for several years as a public venue, Keenan said he had to familiarize himself with city and state regulations long ago. And because the space is collectively run, he keeps meticulous records of past inspections and reports.
So, last Wednesday, when a city employee told him fire officials were on their way to shut the Omni down, Keenan was shocked. Only five days earlier, on Dec. 16, building and fire officials walked through the building and found no violations. They had been following up on a complaint filed Dec. 8 with the city’s building department that the space was illegally being used as a residence. Aubrey Rose, a city planner who handles special events permits, said he notified Keenan of the outstanding complaint after Omni filed for a special event permit to host a memorial for three victims of the Ghost Ship fire.
Following the Dec. 16 inspection, fire inspector Terrence Spencer wrote in his report, “no sign of residential use,” and marked that line with an asterisk. At the bottom, Spencer wrote, “no violations noted/proper use in place.”
Erica Terry Derryck, a spokeswoman for Schaaf, said city officials were acting out of “an abundance of caution.”
“(The) visit on (the) 16th raised some issues that inspectors wanted to go back to look at, given that this is an assembly space and will likely be used for future gatherings,” Derryck said.
Despite multiple requests for comment, city officials have yet to identify what issues remained that allowed building and fire officials to clear the site of any violations but necessitated the building’s closure.
Emails exchanged between Low and Keenan, which were obtained by the Bay Area News Group, reveal the near shut-down on Dec. 21 relied on two words, “heat – stove,” that appeared below the bold-face “Ligure Club” label of the building on a Sanborn insurance company map from 1951. Low claimed the words indicated the space was being used as a store to sell stoves, rather than as an Italian social club, despite multiple public documents indicating otherwise.
“There’s no way Tim Low can tell me with a straight face he misread the simplest of city maps,” Keenan said. “And the impact is huge. It’s not like getting a traffic ticket; it’s the closure of our space.”
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/12/28/omni-commons-experience-highlights-oaklands-heavy-handed-approach-for-artist-spaces/
