Ack! Big troubles at the downtown Bartlett Building (651 S. Spring) reports a correspondent who's been following the downtown adaptive reuse project. Residents are dealing with broken water pumps, costly fire protections and now threats of eviction. We were forwarded an email from Friday the 27th to the Bartlett Building Yahoo! Group (moderated). We've highlighted a few pieces here. The full email is after the jump.
"As we are all aware of, the fire truck is still outside and we are still paying them about $2400 every day its out there. Yes, our primary concern is getting off fire watch but we have just recently become aware of the fact that neither of the pumps can be repaired (after Power Plus tried to repair one) and that we will have to buy 2 new pumps and the price for them is (installed) around $35,000 each.
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If we are not able to pay the fire company to keep the pumps backed up, the fire marshal has threatened to evict everyone from the building.
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We are confident that the city must hear our pleas otherwise they must deal with 140 angry downtown residents who were forced to be evicted because they could not pay the fire company an outrageous sum of money, money that should have been used to fix the fire pumps themselves and lessen the financial burden." More after the jump, and of course if you live in the Bartlett Building we would love to hear from you.
From: bartlettbuilding@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:bartlettbuilding@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of johnny thompson
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 9:31 AM
To: bartlettbuilding@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Bartlett Building] Update
As we are all aware of, the fire truck is still outside and we are still paying them about $2400 every day its out there. Yes, our primary concern is getting off fire watch but we have just recently become aware of the fact that neither of the pumps can be repaired (after Power Plus tried to repair one) and that we will have to buy 2 new pumps and the price for them is (installed) around $35,000 each. We are going to try to collect from Cosco through the insurance company as they are the ones we are told, ran our pumps dry (without oil or water in the system) and burnt them both out. The pumps should have been maintained by them every month and there should be a log documenting Cosco's work which we are currently trying to obtain. We are working with Campion (our new management company) in finding out the best possible solutions as to what our options are and what's the fastest way to get off fire watch. We have had to pull from reserves as we have not collected on the assessments yet. If we are not able to pay the fire company to keep the pumps backed up, the fire marshal has threatened to evict everyone from the building.
If the fire company cannot work with us in an alternative payment situation, then our plan of action must be to lobby our District's representative to hold the fire marshal from evicting us. We are confident that the city must hear our pleas otherwise they must deal with 140 angry downtown residents who were forced to be evicted because they could not pay the fire company an outrageous sum of money, money that should have been used to fix the fire pumps themselves and lessen the financial burden.
Please note we are working hard to avoid further special assessments and our new management appears confident that we may successfully pursue Cosco for damages. However we cannot rule out further special assessments at this time.
In other news, Barry has taken the lead in repairing the booster pumps (these pumps supply hot water throughout our building) and hopefully they will be fixed within the week so they are not leaking the amount of water that they have been leaking recently. The water may be turned off for an intermittent period of time, but we will notify homeowners when this occurs.
The trash chute is now clogged and we cannot get it unclogged as someone has thrown something very tricky down it. We tried for over an hour last night to get it unclogged to no avail so we have notified Campion and this should be taken care of soon.
The vote for security did pass and we will be getting security. We have come to a bridge though in that we can employ security now and pay money out that we do not have, or wait for some stability in the fire watch situation and then we can hire the security.
We understand that these issues are going to raise many questions and we request that you ask them and we will try to answer them to the best of our ability.