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12.16.2003
The Enforcers
BY TOM MOONEY and ZACHARY R. MIDER
Journal Staff Writer
WEST WARWICK -- As the
town slid toward financial collapse in November 1990, Mayor
J. Michael Levesque hunted for budget savings.
He found a two-for-one bargain in Karen Pare, the daughter of a local contractor.
She was 26 and held degrees in interior architecture and fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a certificate in building inspections.
Levesque hired her as the town's building inspector -- and also placed the responsibility of minimum housing inspections in her hands. Pare would work both jobs for $29,000.
While she was in office, the bar at 211 Cowesett Ave. gradually took on the trappings of a nightclub, with entertainment licenses and live bands three nights a week.
That change gave West Warwick officials the chance to demand sprinklers or other modern safety improvements the property, according to the state's building code commissioner.
But West Warwick's rotating cast of town building inspectors -- there were five in five years -- along with a system vulnerable to political interference, and a complex state building code, all worked against effective enforcement.
IN JANUARY 1991, a Providence businessman, Nicholas R. DeStefano, took over what was then a shuttered sports pub at 211 Cowesett Ave.
DeStefano assured the Town Council that his intention was to reopen it as a sports bar, called Crackerjacks. But by April of that year, DeStefano was seeking -- and receiving -- entertainment licenses from the town. Crackerjacks began promoting itself as a home to rock concerts.
Town officials said after the Feb. 20 fire at The Station that the club's age exempted it from needing sprinklers under the "grandfather" clause in the state fire code.
But under a different safety code, the state building code, The Station lost its grandfather rights when it became a nightclub, according to Daniel R. DeDentro, the state building code commissioner.
The state building code treated restaurants and bars differently from nightclubs. When a bar was changed to a nightclub, the safety standards became more rigid, DeDentro told a special legislative panel last spring. (Town officials disagree, saying that there was no change of use, and that their inspectors made no error.)
DeDentro acknowledged in an interview that the code -- interpreted literally by Rhode Island's local building inspectors -- doesn't explain how they are supposed to keep track of a building's use.
IN 1990, Pare's predecessors had both taken advantage of early retirement. Their departure left no one to perform the important function of building and housing inspections.
Those two offices often work in tandem with the local fire marshal -- who performs his own fire inspections -- to assure that buildings are safe.
Pare said she was well-qualified as a building inspector when she was appointed. Besides holding her certificate in building inspection, she was familiar with building construction.
She had a wide range of experience working for her father's construction company -- Phil Pare & Sons -- from digging ditches to designing the Bald Hill Subaru dealership.
In an interview last week, Pare said she never knew the use of the building at 211 Cowesett Ave. had changed when she inspected it in December 1991 as part of the annual liquor-license renewal process.
"Things like that we didn't get to see," she said. "That was part of the problem with the whole system. There was no checks and balances when a use changed."
Further, because there was no written procedure for determining whether a building's use had changed, Pare said, she concentrated on looking for building code violations -- checking emergency lights, making sure the building was handicapped accessible.
What a building was used for, Pare said, was the kind of larger question left up to the Town Council -- at whose pleasure the building inspectors served.
"Everything went before the council."
Pare, hired by a Republican mayor, was fired in 1992 by incoming Democrat Kathryn O'Hare -- a victim of the political nature of the job.
She returned briefly in 1995, just after the town hired its first town manager, but resigned after admitting she removed some items from the abandoned Royal Mills. Pare won't go into the details of her departure, but says she was "politically blackballed."
Serving at the pleasure of the Town Council, she said, "is a tough racket."
THE TOWN was painfully reminded of the importance of proper building inspections when a Christmastime fire in 1995 killed five people in a renovated apartment house.
An initial investigation uncovered overloaded and illegal wiring and an inadequate fire alarm system.
As the new year arrived, investigators with the state fire marshal's office were determined to learn who was responsible.
Investigator Stanley A. Davies visited the apartment house at 66 Highland St. He saw the jumble of overloaded extension cords and the bare wires snaking through the basement. He noted the house lacked a fire alarm system with horns and lights required of apartment houses that size.
And it became clear, as he and colleague John B. Fiore questioned West Warwick officials under oath at the fire marshal's Providence office, that the town had failed to properly inspect the house.
"I felt there was some negligence that the attorney general should have pursued," Davies said recently in an interview.
In the first few weeks of 1996, Davies and Fiore deposed the building inspector, David A. Tacey, two former building inspectors, Pare and Richard A. Belham, and the director of public works in an attempt to learn what had happened on Highland Street.
The town's building inspector's office had no records of building permits for the apartment house -- indicating that a required inspection never took place before it had been expanded from three to seven apartments, in 1984.
Consequently, the Fire Department had never performed
its own required inspection.
And although one of the building inspectors, Pare, had stumbled onto electrical violations when called to the house for an oil-tank leak in October 1992, the violations were all but forgotten when Pare was fired two months later by the new mayor.
PARE'S FILES were carted into the office of the public
works director, who under drastic cost-cutting measures going on in
town was left responsible for building inspections.
State investigator Fiore led the questioning in the deposition of James Andruchow, then the DPW director.
"Who would have been responsible after [Pare] was terminated and these documents were turned over to your department?"
"It would have been me," Andruchow said.
"Would you tell me why the complaint was not pursued?"
"It wasn't pursued -- at the time I was serving double duty: public works director, going into the winter season, which was very hectic that year," Andruchow said. "I was told by Mayor [Kathryn] O'Hare to just oversee that office and do whatever was necessary to keep it running."
Andruchow testified he eventually turned over all building inspection records to the new inspector, Richard Belham, who was hired in February 1993.
And so the fire investigators called in Belham.
He could shed no light on why the electrical violations cited by Pare had never been followed up -- though he did note that Pare's violation notice itself was improper.
"When you give a notice of violation, you have to follow State Building Code procedure under 122.0. That letter did not," Belham said. "You have to be given 30 days to comply . . . That's why I said it was not a legal notice."
THE 1995 FIRE led to calls for reforms in West Warwick.
In August 1996, the Town Council unanimously approved
the appointment of Patrick R. Burelle as the new full-time building inspector.
Burelle was the protégé of the new town manager, who also
came from Hazel Park, Mich.
"As the interviewers of Mr. Burelle, we were impressed with his work attitude, experience and desire to have professionalism in the position," Town Engineer Anthony J. Winiarski, who led the three-member search team, said at the time.
Ten months later, Burelle quit, saying "mean-spirited" politics drove him out of the job.
"There was a lot of pressure for me to bend," Burelle said in a phone interview. "What I was doing was enforcing the code -- probably for the first time ever. But there is a culture there [in West Warwick] that basically, things were addressed as to who you knew and who owned it and how close they were with who."
After welcoming him less than a year earlier, some council members freely voiced pleasure with Burelle's departure.
"He was upsetting the livelihood of people, making it difficult for people who wanted to come in and invest in the town," Richard Padula, a councilman, said at the time. "Cultural change is difficult in a town like West Warwick."
"You've got to understand the pecking order," said Jean Tellier, council president, at the time. "The building inspector answers to the director of public works, who answers to the town manager, who answers to us."
Burelle said it was his unwillingness to "pay homage" to council members that made it impossible to do his job.
A month after Burelle quit, Charles Mauti was hired, in July 1997, to replace him.
He lasted 16 months.
He said he resigned over "differences with town leaders."
"It's all about, not what you know, but who you know in that town," said Mauti, now the building official in Hopkinton. "I wouldn't play that game."
THE ADMINISTRATORS for the estates of those who died in the Highland Street fire -- Edward and Dale Larocque, their two children Adam and Nicholas, and a family friend, Jesse Brodeur -- all sued the town claiming negligence for not properly inspecting the apartment building.
Those suits were finally settled this year prior to going before a jury, says lawyer Mitchell S. Riffkin, who represented the estates of Dale and Nicholas Larocque.
The estates, Riffkin says, received the maximum statutory settlement allowed against a municipality: $100,000 for each death.
While the attorney general's office never charged anyone criminally with the inadequate wiring or inspection, Riffkin says, "There was, however, from our perspective, negligence on the part of the town."
"We felt that the town had failed to inspect the premises," he says, "and as a result of that we felt the electrical service was inadequate and would have been found to exist had the inspection been made."
Charles Mauti says he knows about the culture of small towns.
Even Hopkinton has its politics, he says, but at least, "people are willing to work to achieve the same goal uniformly."
In West Warwick: "People had their own self-interest in mind."
West Warwick, he said, "is a world unto its own. I was very happy to get out of there."
With staff reports by Edward Fitzpatrick
TOMORROW: The Entrepreneurs
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