 Good afternoon, and thank you for joining me for another edition of Kondo Insider. My name is Jane Sugimura, and I'm your host today. And we're going to be talking more about the recently passed City Ordinance 1814, the Fire Safety Ordinance. And we've had several shows on this, but I have an update. And that's going to be of some interest, I hope, to associations of high-rise residential buildings. And this is condominiums and co-ops and any type of residential apartment buildings. But anyway, there was a meeting on last Friday between some professional engineers who are passed by the ordinance to do the life safety evaluation. They met with the fire department because they had some concerns about implementation. And as I said on previous shows, this is not a done deal. I mean, it's a work in progress, and we are getting more and more clarification. But the good news for condominiums is—or it couldn't do it for condominiums and high-rises—is that I have on good authority that the cost of a life safety evaluation is going to run between $5,000 and $20,000. About three weeks ago, somebody came up to me at a seminar and said that their association had set aside $150,000 for a life safety evaluation. I said, why? I mean, that's crazy. And when I went and told the fire chief, he agreed with me. He says, that's outrageous. It's not going to cost that much money. And so for those of you who are listening, I hope you tell your association members and other people who sit on boards on associations and property managers out there, I have it on good authority that the life safety evaluation should not exceed $20,000 unless you got some real strange problems with your building. Let me take a few minutes and talk about the ordinance for those of you who don't know about the fire safety ordinance that was passed in May of this year. And this was in reaction to the Marco Polo fire that happened in July of last year. And those of you who saw it on television and on your computers, I mean, it was a horrific fire. And it just spread so quickly throughout the building that in response, the mayor came back with a bill that required all high rises to be retrofitted for fire sprinklers. And I'm pleased to report that I was appointed to be on the fire safety task force to deal with the concerns raised by the mayor's bill. And I was there as a representative of the condo associations, one of the representatives there, representing condo associations. And we worked with the city officials and the fire department and engineers and others who are stakeholders on this issue to come up with some changes to the mayor's bill so that condos, the end result is a compromise bill. It was a bill that we didn't really like and the mayor I'm sure didn't like. But it was a compromise bill. It did call for mandatory sprinklers, but it allowed at the end for condos and high rises to opt out of that provision, subject to certain conditions. Okay, so right now the bill basically says that all high rise residential buildings have to be retrofitted for fire sprinklers, except if you're under 10 stories or you have open exterior corridors. That means if you walk out your unit door and there's no wall, there's air. That means that if you have that in your building and no interior closed corridors, you don't have to do sprinklers. And there are about 300 buildings in Honolulu, high rise residential, and this is co-ops and condos and apartment buildings. And about half of them are either below 10 stories or have open exterior corridors. Everybody has to do a life safety evaluation and a life safety evaluation is an inspection of the building by professional architects and engineers who then report, make a report to the fire department as to the safety of your building. And they basically look at 17 items and they make a report. And they report their findings on something that is called the matrix. It's a spreadsheet developed by the fire department. And throughout our program, you're going to see something scrolling. There it is right now. That's the website for the fire department. And that's where you go and you can look at the matrix. And the matrix is basically a spreadsheet. And I don't know if you can see it, but it's basically a spreadsheet. And the engineers can download it for free from the city. And they would be engaged by the associations to go through their buildings and check off certain items in the buildings and report it to the city. And in order to avoid having to put in sprinklers, the buildings that aren't exempt from sprinklers, that means anything over 10 stories and with interior corridors, you have to pass the life safety evaluation. And this life safety evaluation basically concentrates on 17 items and they're listed on the spreadsheet. That's why I suggest that if you're an association board member or a property manager or a site manager or a resident manager, you want to become real familiar with the 17 items on the matrix because that's what they come and you're going to be checked on. And some things you can change and some things you can't, like the height of the building, what kind of construction is in the building, how far is it from the middle of the building to the exterior stairwells, how many stamp pipes you have. These are things you can't change. And so if you have them, it's probably a plus. And if you don't have them, then you're in trouble. But what it does is the life safety evaluation basically goes through your building and checks for certain things. And if you get a passing score, you don't have to put in fire sprinklers. And even if you don't get a passing score, you would then work with your professional who did the inspection and find out, well, let's see, you missed it by two points, you missed it by four points, and what can you do to get a passing score so you don't have to put in fire sprinklers. And in the end, if you choose not, I mean, even if you can't pass it, you can opt out. You can opt out and you do that through a, if you're a condominium, you do that at an annual meeting. If you're a co-op, you also do it at an annual meeting. But you have to vote. The shareholders vote in a co-op, the members of the association vote in a condo. And you vote to opt out of the ordinance and you have to post a sign saying that you do not have sprinklers in the building. And you have to make sure that any prospective buyers who are interested in buying in your project are aware that you don't have sprinklers. And that's easy to do because when you sell a condominium, you have to fill out this form. The seller of the unit has to fill out the form. And one of the questions that can be added to the form is whether or not the building has got fire sprinklers. And that's how you notify prospective buyers whether or not there are sprinklers in the building. And now this matrix that is on the website, the reason why I suggest that you listeners, if you're board members, property managers or site managers become very familiar, is because you should take this matrix and walk your board members, if you're a site manager or property manager, make sure your board members walk the building and know what these items are. Because I know when I was on the committee and they came up with this matrix, I didn't know what a stand pipe was. And now I know what a stand pipe is. I know that fire raided doors on the corridors have metal plates on it. And if they don't have the metal plates, then they're not fire raided. And you may say, well, what does it matter? And it's like most associations don't want to put in sprinklers because of the cost. It's tremendously expensive to retrofit a building. And that's what's driving the resistance to retrofit is because it costs so much. And the unit owners would have to pay for retrofitting their units. And we're talking about a substantial amount, maybe $60,000 per unit. And that's not including what those unit owners would have to pay to install them in the common areas. Plus, if you're going to be installing, retrofitting your building with fire sprinklers, you have to have a 10 by 10 room somewhere in the project to install a pump to force all the water that is going to be needed by this sprinkler system. And that's a problem because most buildings are maxed out and nobody has an extra 10 by 10 room to install a pump that can otherwise service this fire sprinkler system. And so there are lots of issues and reasons why people don't want to install the fire system, the fire sprinklers. And that's why it's important if they want to pass this life safety evaluation that they understand the matrix and what it takes. The professionals that are going to be doing the inspection and walking through the building, they will be charging the associations for their professional time. Because the matrix is free, the matrix is on the fire department website, here it is again. Anybody who wants to go can get it, it's showing on the bottom of our screen. And the professionals can go and they download this matrix. And so they have the software that's being provided to them by the city for free. So the cost of a life safety evaluation is only for the professional time that the professionals are in your building, the architects and engineers. So that means if they're in your building for 10 hours, they can charge you, I mean the cost is going to be 10 hours times their hourly rate, which is somewhere around, I think it's around $200 or more. So you have to take this into consideration. So the more you are familiar with the matrix and the items that have to be inspected, and if you can prepare for the inspection before the professionals come to your building, that means they're going to be spending less time in your building and it's going to result in less cost. And so let's say it's going to cost $20,000 at a maximum and it's $200 an hour. It looks like that would be maybe 10 hours, I'm sorry, 100 hours. So that might mean two and a half weeks for a professional to be in your building. We're going to take a break now for about a minute and then when we come back, I'm going to go into specifics about what you need to know about in order to negotiate this agreement that you're going to be entering into with these professionals to come and do the life safety evaluation for your building. So let's take a break now and I'll be back. Thank you. I'm Jay Fidel, ThinkTech. ThinkTech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on ThinkTech. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklob. I am the host of ThinkTech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on ThinkTech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Okay. Welcome back to Kondo Insider. My name is Jane Sugimura. I'm your host today and we're talking about negotiating the life safety valuation contract. And you know, I talked about the matrix and where you can get it. And we're scrolling the website for the fire department. That's where you can go and get a copy of the matrix. And I suggest that all of you go ahead and do it. One of the things that happened at this meeting that I talked about earlier between the professionals and the fire department on Friday is that they determine that one of the issues, one of the factors that would be used to determine one of the risk factors was mobility. Mobility was if you had a person who had problems walking and whether or not they could walk to a safe area or walk down the steps out of a high-rise building. And that became problematic. And my understanding from the meeting that happened on Friday is mobility has been removed as a risk factor. So now whether or not you have people who have mobility problems, that means somebody has a problem walking around, whether they're in a wheelchair or a walker or maybe they just, you know, can't walk very fast. But now that is no longer a risk factor. And so that's on page one of the matrix, it does have different risk factors. And for example, the smaller the building, the smaller the risk. And the risk is how long can it take to get the residents out of a building in case of an emergency and how long does it take for the first responders like the fire department or the emergency people to get into the building to deal with the emergency. And so the shorter the building, the less risky. The higher the building, the longer it takes for people to get out and for people to go up and deal with the emergency. And so the height of a building is a risk factor. Mobility at one time was a risk factor. It is no longer a risk factor. And I think that addresses a lot of concerns that associations were faced with because that meant that, you know, every building was going to have to figure out how many people in their building had mobility issues and how would that affect the safety evaluation. And the professional said that that was just something that was not workable, that they could not certify. And so the fire department agreed that that factor, risk factor, could be removed. And one other thing that happened was this interior finishes, corridor, and exits. That's one of the items on the matrix. And that only applies. The fire department made it real clear to the professionals that the interior finishes were only as to the corridors. They, the inspectors, this meant that the inspectors did not have to go into the units. We, because our position was you can't, you know, the fire safety ordinance did not contemplate that the inspectors would have to go into the units. And we would consider that intrusive and almost impossible for an association to deal with because if you have 300 units and you have to coordinate an inspector going into all 300 units, that's just not going to happen. And it's going to be so expensive time consuming for an inspector, for an architect or an engineer at their hourly rate of $200 to do that. So that's just not doable. So anyway, we know from that meeting on Friday that interior finish is only for corridors and not inside units. We also know that the fire department and the professionals came to some kind of understanding about the construction between the walls and the building itself between different rooms. And so in order, in order to test that, the agreement reached between the professionals and the fire department was that the professionals would inspect a representative number of units. That means they would go into, in other words, and this is something that the association can negotiate with their professionals. The agreement was that the professionals could inspect a representative sample and a representative sample could be 10%, it could be 20%, it could be five. But this is something that an association can negotiate with the vendor whenever... So if you are dealing with a professional who gives you a proposal, that's something that the association would want to know. How many units are you considering to be a representative sample when you go in to check the walls? And with concrete, if it's not concrete, they're going to have to make a boring, and I'm told it's going to be a small hole, less than an inch, they put in a camera to check the width of the wall because that would give the professional an indication of the safety. How long would it take for the fire to burn through that wall at that width? And so they're going to be doing that. And I've been told by the professional, if it was him, he would do the boring, he would just fill it up or the resident manager would come in and fill in the hole, and it would be easy to fix. And it would be very quick, they wouldn't have to spend more than maybe 15 or 20 minutes inside a unit. And with the representative sample, he would look at maybe 10%. And these things are negotiable. That's why it's important for the associations and their board members to become very familiar with this matrix because there's things on here that you can negotiate. And if some vendor says to you, I want to go into 50%, you say, well, no, thank you, I'm going to check with someone else. And I would go with the vendor who will agree to 10% or less as a representative sample. And one other thing that the professionals and the fire department agree on is that the professionals can deputize or use other contractors or workers that can go and do some of the inspections at a lower rate than their professional rate. Let's say an architect is $200 an hour. You don't want to pay even a junior architect to go around and check the smoke alarms in the units because that's one of the items. One of the items is how many smoke alarms, where are they located, because you get plus points if you have one in every bedroom and one in the hallway, you get plus points if they're connected. Okay, so do you want to pay an architect at their hourly rate of $200? And you know, the professionals say, no, we don't want to send our people to do that. So there is an amendment sitting before the city council, which council member Carol Fukunaga has agreed to insert into the ordinance. That's bill 72. And it changes the language of the bill so that it says that the life safety evaluation will be done by or under the supervision of a professional. That means that when you do your life safety, when you do your high risk component inspection, people live in condominiums, you can send along with your plumber, send a maintenance person to check about smoke alarms in each unit. And that person can also check the doors to see if they are an inch and three quarters wide, whether they're solid core and whether they have a metal automatic closer. And these things can be put into a report and can be handed to the professional and then they can then look at a representative sample, let's say 10%. And if you have a building of 300 units, that means that they would have to go into 30 of the units and just make sure that the information is consistent with the report that's given to them by the maintenance person that was deputized to assist them. And these are things that if you know about ahead of time, you can incorporate them into your negotiations and you can reduce the cost for this life safety evaluation. That's why the range is from five to 20,000 because it depends on how much time the professional has to spend in your building. And if you've got people on your staff who can do the inspections and submit a report to your professional, that's going to take off a whole lot of time for them. And one thing that the professionals are looking for is, they're looking for, right now I know that there's an issue with vertical openings. Vertical openings for those of you who don't know because I didn't know what a vertical opening was either. When they build a building, they have to make holes for the pipes that go from the first floor all the way up to the 40th floor. All your plumbing has, there's pipes that go through the floors. And after, I think I'm told that before 1980, they didn't require the vertical openings to be sealed, but after 1980, they did require them to be sealed. And so we were told that in the Marco Polo, one of the big hazards was there are vertical openings in the Marco Polo where the fire just allowed the fire to spread throughout the building. But the professionals have told the fire department that they can't really deal with vertical openings because that would mean making holes in the walls of all the units. And if the buildings were built before 1980, none of the vertical openings are sealed. So that would be a horrendously expensive project. So that's a question mark. Like I said, it's not a done deal. The life safety evaluation is not a done deal. The fire department is looking at the issue of vertical openings, and they may be making changes to that on the matrix. They may even be removing the vertical openings as an item on the matrix. And I'm running out of time right now, but what I want to do in a future program, because like I said, it's not a done deal. And I'd like to have on our program somebody from the fire department and a professional who would be doing the life safety evaluation to talk about exactly what agreements have been made about what they're looking for, what associations can do to make the process easier. But right now we do have information that the fire department is working with the professionals to clarify what has to be done. And we now know that the cost of doing a life safety evaluation is going to be, it's going to run from five to 20,000. And that's just a rough estimate. And like I said, that it's not a done deal yet. It may be less, it may be more. And what I ask is that you stay tuned because it is a work in progress. And we are all working to try to make it easier, faster, and cheaper. Because we know that this is a long term project that is going to involve condominium associations for many, many, many years. So you need to be patient. You need to be patient. We're all working really hard to try to clarify it so that it isn't so confusing anymore. And I hope you join us next week, where we will have another show on condominium living and for people who live and work in condominiums. Thank you for joining us today. And good afternoon.