It’s good to be king: The City Hall sprinkler problem
One nice feature of being a government body is that you get to exempt yourself from the rules you make. Consider the issue of placing sprinklers in high-rise buildings. Since 1996, all high-rise buildings in San Diego must have sprinkler systems for fire suppression. But City Hall doesn’t have those sprinklers, at least not on nine of its 13 floors. Since it will cost in the neighborhood of $5 million to install them, and since the city clings to the everlasting hope of building a new City Hall, they’ve given themselves a waiver for the last 13 years. But when the City Council went to renew the waiver two weeks ago, they had a lot of question and decided to put off the decision until this afternoon.
One of the questions the Council had last time around was whether or not the city was actually liable for damages if there was a big fire in City Hall. In an official memo to the City Council, Deputy City Attorney Nina Fain concludes:
Generally, a city–like all governments–is immune form tort liability…. However, there are certain statutory exceptions to that immunity such that the city may be held liable for failure to discharge a mandatory duty, for maintaining a hazardous condition on city property, and/or public nuisance.
So, if I read that right, the city is never liable for damages… except when it is.
There is a clue from an early part of the memo that the city might only be liable if it fails to extend its waiver: “If the ordinance is not adopted, the city will not be in compliance with the requirements of the Municipal Code.”
So, the City Council will only make the city liable if it doesn’t pass the extension. Either Fain or her boss, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, will present the memo at the meeting at 2, so perhaps he’ll clarify things then.
