CIty officials are feeling the heat for mishandling the building and construction permits of the Sala San Marco Banquet Hall, on Preston Street.
City officials failed to enforce the building code during the renovation of a Preston Street banquet hall, says the city’s auditor general.
The mishandling, says Alain Lalonde, highlights problems with how the city enforces construction rules.
The owners of Preston Street’s Sala San Marco hall renovated the building without demolition and construction permits.
Lalonde says the city’s building services knew construction was ongoing but didn’t do enough to make sure the owners were compliant.
“I want to raise a fundamental debate,” says Lalonde.
“What’s important is what type of enforcement we want. It’s about whether we will be passive or more aggressive in terms of application of the building code.”
The auditor’s report lists 12 recommendations.
But Arlene Grégoire, the city’s chief building official, disagrees with most of them.
“We don’t have guns and we can’t throw them in jail,” she says.
“All we can do is follow the process which the legislation has provided us. . . and that’s what we were doing,” says Grégoire.
She says Building Services issued a stop work order, but the owners continued construction.
Building Services then took them to court and fined them $10,000.
Lalonde says they could have refused to give the owners an occupancy permit until they had all other necessary permits.
“It’s one thing to go to court and have a judgement, but another when nobody is enforcing it,” he says.
“Why do you bother to go to court in the first place if you will knowingly let that happen?”
He adds that even after the hefty fine, the owners continued construction.
Luigi Aprile, one of the owners of Sala San Marco, says he was unaware that construction was going on without a permit until it was almost complete.
He says he assumed the architect, Ovidio Sbrissa, had the permits before work began.
“We were kind of surprised, but we couldn’t turn back,” says Aprile.
Building Services reported Sbrissa to the Ontario Association of Architects, but Sbrissa claims no wrongdoing.
“The client is totally lying. They were aware they were building without a permit but they decided to go ahead and build anyways,” says Sbrissa.
Sbrissa says the owners of Sala San Marco started construction before he had a chance to submit all the paperwork to Building Services.
He says he wasn’t able to stop the owners from renovating.
The banquet hall is used for large events and clients often book the hall over a year in advance.
“We couldn’t postpone the progress because we had a very tight window to do this renovation in,” says Aprile.
“We had to meet those obligations and that’s why we had to finish the job.”
Lalonde criticizes building officials for trying to balance the financial impact on the owners with the actual application of the building code, something Grégoire acknowledges they try to do.
“The role of Building Services is not economic development. They are there to apply the building code,” says Lalonde.
The city inspected the building and found it to be safe.
City Council has until April 8 to hold public hearings, review the audit and make a decision about how building services should operate.