How proposed SF seismic-safety ordinance could impact property owners

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- San Francisco is one step closer to finding out how many buildings are not seismically sound.

ABC7 News spoke to one of the city's supervisors who is co-sponsoring an ordinance that would give the city insight into which buildings still need to be retrofitted.

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"This is a category of buildings largely concrete buildings built prior to 1995. Those buildings if they don't have steel in them, which most of them if it's not steel in a particular way can be in very bad shape. In the event of a big earthquake and that can be very dangerous for residents or people working in those buildings," said San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman.

The ordinance introduced by Supervisor Myrna Melgar and co-sponsored by Mandelman would give the city clarity about the number of structures at risk. It will be brought up for a vote at the board of supervisors on Tuesday.

"If this ordinance passes on Tuesday, building owners of concrete and tilt-up buildings will need to hire a structural or a civil engineer. Fill out a screening form and return that form with some basic information to the city," said senior earthquake resilience analyst Laurel Mathews.

If approved the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection will have about six months to set up the program and after that building owners will have 18 months to fill out and submit the screening form.

The city is not going to mandate retrofitting the buildings just yet. Supervisor Mandelman said for now getting the information is the goal.

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"No requirement yet that property owners actually do that work although if you do own one of those properties you may want to seriously consider doing that work and at some point, we are going to have to require it," said Supervisor Mandelman.

For some small property owners hearing about all this leads to one big concern.

"This legislation is well-intentioned, but it does potentially open the door for very expensive repairs that remains to be seen who is going to pay for," said Matt Nichols, contractor and small property owner.

We asked Supervisor Mandelman about this.

"What kind of city resources might we be able to provide for property owners who may not have a ton of money? Can we create low interest or no interest loan programs? This is not a good year to be trying to solve that problem on the city budget side and it's not frankly a good year for a lot of private property owners to be doing it either, but we are going to need to address this."