2008-10-08 Board of Ethics Minutes

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severity of the violation — certain things need to be corrected sooner. A blocked exit door needs to be corrected immediately. Exit doors that aren't working, we need to correct them obviously sooner. Broken exit lights, we want —a lot of times, those things, they seem to be really minor, but if the lights go out, and the light doesn't work, nobody knows how to get out. Everybody's habit is to go to the front door where they came in from. So if everybody's going through the front door, then obviously you're going to have a stampede there, and then you're going to have a blocked exit, and people get trapped. LUM: Yeah, we've all read those- PERREIRA: - -So we try to be fair, and we give them some time. And in other occasions, we need to be more strict and get things done quicker. In this occasion, I did an inspection, a formal inspection, in April 2007, I believe it is. I have all my records here. But —and I actually sent this inspection, because I was having trouble with Ivan responding to my request on fixing things, I sent this via certified mail, and it was dated April 26, 2007. And that's really my first formal inspection of actually walking through with him during the day, not when they're open, and doing an inspection of his property. The other inspections were done at night, while they were open, walking through to make sure the doors were open, making sure the exits aren't blocked, making sure that the stairways aren't cluttered with items —which we found. I have reports of all of that. But in April of 2007, I conducted this. I went back numerous times between then and did another inspection, I believe in August, tried to give them some time. All this time we'd been going there, trying to work with them— L UM: - -You went in between- PERREIRA: - -Yes, in between- LUM: - -But not officially- PERREIRA: -- Officially, because I'm on duty- LUM: - -Okay- PERREIRA: - -at night. This hasn't been addressed, this hasn't been addressed. They did address some of the electrical concerns, and I noted that in one of my reports, and it wasn't until October of 2007 that we gave them an official you need to fix this, or else we need to shut down your establishment. And that was done after talking with my battalion chief, having a meeting with the owner and the manager previous in August, and working with our fire chief, because unfortunately fortunately, I'm not the one that shuts down the business. We have to go through the chain of command, and we work with our fire chief, and we try to work with the people first. And if the infractions are large enough, we need to think of the safety of the people. CHAIR: So you were having a kind of a slow response from them-