 Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us again today for another edition of Condo Insider. With me today, we have Jane Sugimura, who is the president of Hawaii Council of Community Associations. She's been forever the president. I mean, we've been around since 1975, but a lot of people are still becoming aware of us. And I think we're really making a difference on some of these things that we have to comply with. But so earlier in the week, we had, by invitation with Councilmember Carol Fukunaga, we had a Zoom meeting that included the fire department, the heads of the fire department. And our topic of conversation was on these ordinances in relationship to fire safety, the life safety evaluation. And so it was actually really good. There were like about close to 100 participants, condo board members that had RSVP to be in attendance. And a lot of things came out of it. So we kind of want to go through some of those issues or some of the conversations that we had in regards to the life safety evaluation and compliance. I know one of the big things that the fire department presented was kind of the top categories that are creating condos to fail the life safety. One of the big ones were the vertical openings, the fire alarm system. And then also, which is surprising to me, is they're failing because of the lack of smoke alarms or smoke detectors as some of them. That's the battery operated ones that have to be within, the city code is they're supposed to be over every single bedroom doorway. So even if you have a hallway and two doorways on the opposite ends, you still have to have them above each individual doorway. They can't be just in the middle of the hallway. They have to be over every single doorway. But that simple little five or $10 alarm is creating some of these condos to fail, which to me, that's an easy fix. Yeah, and to me, it is an easy fix, really, because, but the problem is I don't think anybody knows about it, you know? And I think until I got onto the task force, I wasn't even aware, but there is, I mean, there was an ordinance that was passed by the city, except that because they're inside of a unit, nobody ever inspects it. I don't think any condos ever inspect their units, but in connection with this life safety evaluation, that was one of the 17 items. And, you know, to me, I figured that was an easy fix. And we kept telling the people of the 17 items, there are things you can't do. I mean, things you can fix, I mean, things that you can adjust and things that you can't, like the size of your building, you can't change that. It is what it is, right? If you've got a nine-story building or a 40-story building, I mean, it is what it is. So if you're a nine-story building, you're gonna get plus points because it's less risky. If you're a 40-story building, you're gonna get minus points because you're very risky, okay? And things like standpipes, standpipes are, you know, big pipes that are put into the building when they construct it. So you're supposed to have a standpipe by every exit stairwell, okay? And if they didn't put them in, when they built the building, you can't put them in, well, I guess you can put them in, but it's gonna be very, very, very expensive. So that's one of the things you can't change. But the things like smoke alarms, smoke detectors, those are things that you can change. And in fact, they're so cheap. I know my building, we were talking about buying them en masse over at Home Depot or Costco and just giving them to the unit owners and having, you know, maybe, you know, our staff, the maintenance staff install them. But, you know, to me, I said, no, no, no, you can't have the maintenance staff doing that because then when we tell people, you can't use our staff to do your handy work and handyman, you know, the fixing. And so if you say, oh, but we're gonna use the maintenance staff to install your, I mean, your smoke detectors, I think that sends the wrong message. So, you know, people, I mean, they're not hard to install, right? And they're cheap. They're not, they're easy, they're easy. Yeah, and they're cheap. And so that was one of the 17 items that I figured, okay, everybody could pass this, but it seems like that's, but, you know, on the plus side, you know, when that's one of your things that you're failing, that's an easy fix. You just go around and you, you know, you have your people, your maintenance people or your site manager go and do a survey and find out which units don't have smoke detectors and install. And then you have your life safety, you know, the licensed professional come back and do the inspection. And that comes off your LSE. But so what it's saying is that a lot of associations aren't taking the time to educate their owners that they got, and I know in our building, we sent out a memo saying, you know, if we don't pass this life safety evaluation, it's gonna cost everybody an arm and a leg to comply. So the easy stuff like smoke detectors and making sure, you know, your doors are fire rated because if they're not fire rated, you let us know. You know, let's see how many doors we gotta replace. Make sure that you have metal door closures at the top. And these are the things that make your door close automatically, right? And if you have a doorstop, make sure that the doorstop is off when the licensed professional walks through the building. These are things that people, I mean, the associations have control over. You can get out there and you can, you know, send memos, you can send your site manager, your maintenance people throughout the building and tell them you've got to comply. And if you don't comply, you know, we're gonna get dinged on it and then we're gonna have to, you know, go back and, you know, everybody's gonna have to do stuff and the licensed professional will come back. But, you know, so I'm not so much worried about the smoke detectors. I'm surprised that that is such a big item. The big thing is, what do you call it? The vertical openings. And what came out when the condo people met, right? We had our own Zoom meeting before we met with the fire department is since the ordinance says that buildings that are 10 feet or 75 feet high are exempt from all of the ordinance, why can't we start our so-called problem areas? Like, if you're gonna install sprinklers, start at the 11th floor, right? Or with vertical opening. And the whole purpose of the 75 feet and the 10 stories is because that's how tall the ladder's off, right? That means that the fire department can fight the fire from their trucks without coming into the building, okay? Which makes- I don't think that make a ladder that goes up to 26 floors, right? Yeah, so 75 feet is like the maximum that that ladder goes and that makes it safer for them. They're outside the building and they can fight the fire. And so if that's the case, then why not, when we install sprinklers say, if you're gonna install sprinklers, you can start at the 11th floor, right? Which means the cost of installation is cut in half. Right, right. And if we're talking about vertical openings, that means your cost to fix or to do the adjustment means that you don't have to start for two, right? You can start at floor 11, which is a huge savings. Yeah. Although I don't think the fire department quite addressed that, although we raised it. But to me, I thought some, I don't know who brought it up, but I thought that was a really good idea to start. Since it's already in the ordinance that buildings under 10 stories or 75 feet would be exempt and all of the requirements for vertical openings, because all old buildings have vertical openings. Right. You're not gonna get away from that. And for people who are listening, who don't know what vertical openings are, when you build a building and you have to have wires and plumbing that go from the first ground floor all the way up to the top floor, which is, and if you're 40 stories, it goes all the way up to the 40th floor, they cord the building, they made holes so that these pipes could go up from the ground floor to the top. And then if it was electrical wires or whatever, you ran them through the conduit to get to the 10th floor or the 15th floor or whatever. So there's all these, and that's inside the walls of your building. And then because the holes that they drill to put the conduits into it are usually larger than the conduit, you have to put some kind of a sealant between the pipe, the conduit, and the floor. And so there's this sealant or putty or foam or whatever you wanna call it, but there's something between the pipe and the floor so that the air cannot get through. Yeah, so screw up the updraft of the fire going up. Right. And after 30, 40 years, those seals deteriorate. So there's no more seals. So now you got air, you got holes. That's what vertical openings are. And when you have a fire, it creates an updraft. So if you have 40 floors and all these vertical openings because you have pipes that go from every floor, you have conduits with wiring in it that go from the ground floor all the way to the top, right? You have all of these pipes where the seals have all deteriorated. And in order to fix it, that means you have to break through a wall and seal it. And I guess the product that you use to seal the vertical openings is not expensive. It's the breaking through the wall and doing the sealing and closing up the wall and you do it for every floor and you have to do it, I guess, in stacks, right? However, they have the pipes and that's what's really expensive. So if you wanna prevent the updraft, maybe we can have the vertical openings sealed every two or three floors, every five floors. You know what I mean? Not every floor. And then we can start for us floor 11 and go to the top which will cut the cost of repairs because I'm hearing estimates on, I heard an estimate from a building that saw 23 stories and they have to do vertical openings from the second floor all the way up to floor 23. And it's a bill of almost $750,000. And what a mess because with your unit owners, that means somebody's gonna be, I don't know where it is but certain units are gonna be right up against where that opening is. So they're gonna have to break down, break a wall, go in, do the sealing, fix up the wall, go to the next floor, take a hole in the wall, put the sealant in, close up the wall. And that wall is gonna have to be open for an X amount of period of time because they're gonna have to make sure the sealant dries and then if they might have to go back and reseal it again if it didn't completely fill. So that's gonna be time consuming but it's kind of amazing because I was exposed one time. I can't remember what the circumstance was where it was the vertical opening and I was like, wow, you can hear the wind just travel into that area. I was kind of surprised, you know. So- And that's what the fire department says. And they said that at the Marco Polo, I mean, that fire traveled six floors. It went from floor 20, it started at 426. It didn't go down, it went up, right? It went up to I think the 32nd floor. And the way it got up, people say, well, how can that happen? It doesn't come, and people think, oh, that's, and you saw the picture of the fire where the flames are shooting out of the windows, right? That's not how the fire travels. If travels inside the building through the vertical openings. And one of the, and I was on the task force and what we were told, the vertical openings at the Marco Polo, some of them were as big as a person. That mean, because you're talking about a huge building with big pipes, right? And so they said that the vertical openings were huge. And so what happened was the fire, you know, broke, you know, it burned through a wall, got into a vertical openings and then it shot up, right? And that's, and so it doesn't travel from the outside and jump from floor to floor. It travels from the inside of the building and then it goes up and then it burns out through the wall. And so, you know, that's the scary part. That's the scary part because, you know, if you're above, you don't know, you think it's gonna come, the fire is gonna come at you through the hallway. It's not, it's gonna come out, come at you through the wall, right? The vertical openings. And plus they have that wind advice. I mean, the wind advantage too, because in that, where Makropolo is, I mean, that wind that comes down, I mean, it's, if you've ever lived in a high rise in Makiki, I mean, if you don't have those door closers, the wind literally, I mean, I've had instances where my fingers got caught in the door when the wind just slammed it shut, you know? So that wind also just fueled that thing incredibly, you know? So that's another reason why to have, especially with the door closers, you really want that as well, right? That was another item that some people want to try. And one of the things that, you know, that's why the matrix, there's 17 items and a lot of it focuses on doors because with the Makropolo, with the unit where the fire started, the people ran out, they left the door open and then they went down the hallway and the corridor was left open because there were no metal door closers that made the door shut, okay? And what that does is it allows the fire to travel. And that's what makes it, you know, dangerous. And that's why, you know, on the matrix, you know, one of the thing is fire raider doors, they look at the metal closures on the top of the doors to make sure it closes automatically and that there are no door stops, right? That will make the door stay open and they look at doors with louvers. Louvers are no good, right? And so, you know, these are things, you know, all of them. I mean, basically, you know, they're looking at, and the Makropolo had all these problems. They had doors with louvers, they had doors that didn't have automatic door closures and, you know, they left them open. They had vertical openings. They didn't have standpipes by every stairwell, I'm told. I'm told that they had the standpipes at the up. And you know how long that building is? That building was like a huge wave, right? Right. The standpipes were at the two ends. So they had no standpipe in the middle of the building. You know, so which makes it kind of hard when you're talking about, because that standpipe is where the water is, right? And so, you know, and in our meeting, in the condo meeting, I know some people expressed some dismay that we, the other condominiums, we have to pay for what happened at the Makropolo, right? That's what they kept saying, but we're not the Makropolo. Our building is different. It's smaller, it's narrower, you know, and you know, we don't have fires. We've never had a fire. And so how come we got to pay for what happened at the Makropolo? And you know, and so that's, you know, kind of unfortunate, but you know, that's what happens. Something happens and unfortunately at the Makropolo, and you know, this ordinance that was implemented, 19-4 was not the first time in the city that the city considered mandatory retrofitting of fire sprinklers happened twice before. It happened in 2000, happened in 2005. I was on both task force and we were able to stop it, okay? At the Makropolo, you had four people who died. The fires in 2000 and 2005, nobody died. And maybe that's why we have this ordinance, you know, because, you know, some people, you know, felt, okay, I got to be the hero to people, to make sure that, you know, this never happens again, that people don't die in horrific fires. And so now we have an ordinance that all of us, you know, are trying to comply with. And two things that we found out that those two meetings are private meeting with the condos and the one with the fire department. A lot of us are gonna need more time because we're finding out, we're finding out because of the, you know, because when the ordinance was passed, nobody knew what would happen with implementation. Nobody knew. And now that we are into implementation, now we kind of know. And, you know, it's kind of disheartening because the fire department said they had what 196 LSEs, right, turned into them. And out of the 196 that got turned into them, only nine buildings got passed these fours. That's awful. It is. And I think one of the big concerns for some of the people that were in that meeting were that, yeah, they may have completed their LSEs and it shows a failure, but there's no follow-up between the fire department or that professional completed it to help them put them on a roadmap to be able to, or even go through the easy fixes so that they can pass, you know, and put them on a plan. And then the other comment that I remember was, you know, with Theodore, he, I mean, it was really good. That's why I kind of like want to review that chat because he had all the timelines and he said the timelines don't make sense for compliance like your permits. And, you know, once you get a permit you got to start within 180 days. But, you know, like he said, he may not even have his financing in complete by that, you know, so now his permit's gonna, he has to go revise his permit or reapply for a permit. So that's another issue. But then the fire department says, well, we'll always work with you. And that's set to be a little bit uncomfortable with people because you can always say that in the beginning and we'll work with you. But when the time. So now we got it on tape. Yeah, yeah, true, you know, but when it comes time to it, you know, because right now we're dealing with new players in the fire department, right? Right. So when it comes to really time to it, how are they really gonna work with these individual AOs? They can always say, well, you know, you're not in compliance, you know? But, you know, that's why I thought this meeting was interesting because, you know, there was, and I was, I was, you know, when I saw the fire department, you saw how many there were. There were more than about six of them, right? More than six, I think there was 10. Really? There was a room full of fire department people because it was only supposed to be two, right? On the panel. But then when we sent them the list of how many of us were gonna show up, all of a sudden you got a room full of fire department captains. And I'm thinking, okay, we got their attention. This is a good thing. Yeah. And, you know, so I'm thinking other than the fact that, you know, they said publicly, hell no, right now we're not inclined to change the matrix. To me, I thought that that was a little bit of a disappointment because, you know, to me the ordinance is a work in progress because none of us knew, not even the fire department, how it would play out. And what we're finding out and what we're finding out, at least I'm hearing, you know, I'm hearing anecdotally that some life safety licensed professionals, they were told, they knew at the front end when we started this whole thing that they would not make their money on doing the life safety evaluations. They would get there, they would make their money implementing the changes. Right. And I guess, you know, the fact that out of 169 you only got nine buildings passing that shows you that, yeah, we kind of knew that the buildings are old and they're gonna need some work. But the problem is what we're finding out is that some life, some licensed professionals are taking advantage of associations and saying, you know, well, you know, in order to get a passing score, you gotta do X, Y, and Z except X, Y, and Z cost you a million dollars. Well, the one that really stands out the most is the one that recommended that they do a diesel generator and to put it on the roof so that if there was a fire, the fire department could access the elevators via the generator. And I was like, I thought we were told never to use the elevator in case of a fire. Right. And the fire and the elevator company was really upset that that was one of the recommendations. Yeah. And so situations like that, shouldn't we be able to go to the fire department and say, hey, this is what the design professional said. I mean, isn't this against? And to me, the fire department should be able to go back to that design professional, say, what are you doing? You know, and kind of put them on the right path. Well, anyway, that's what they said that that's what, what I said, you know, when we brought that up, they said that they would meet, that they meet with them regularly. And so that they would have a talk with them that this is not in their best interest. There's a lot of business out there. And the thing of it is, is that all of us talk and they saw, they saw over a hundred of us, right? On the zoom. And so, you know, we have a network. And I think that's one thing that, you know, the people on the meeting learn is you got to talk to one another and compare notes, right? And, and, and so that's very powerful because now the fire department is going to be, because they agreed with us that the licensed professional should not be taking care and taking advantage of associations just to make money on the implementation of repairs in order to get a passing score, because that's wrong, right? And, and to give you an example, you know, my building, I mean, and it seems like, you know, upgrading your fire alarm system seems to be the panacea. It seems like I, you know, a lot of these buildings that I'm hearing about, that's what their licensed professional tells them. So fine, okay, I said, fine, okay. So what's it going to cost us? And, you know, so we went out and we got a bid for the hardware and our licensed professional gave us a bid for engineering. And it was almost $100,000. I said, that's ridiculous. So I went out and we got alternative bids. So if we do, if we do install the fire, you know, alarm system, we're not going to use our licensed professional. We're going to use some other company because he priced himself right out, you know, because I'm not paying that kind of money. And to me, I mean, he must have known that, that, I mean, he's your licensed professional. You know what it costs. You know what other licensed professionals in Honolulu are going to charge if, if they're, if they, you get this request about, oh, we're going to install, upgrade our fire alarm system. So we need engineering. What are you going to charge us for this, for 200 unit building, for 100 unit building, a 300 unit building, right? And, and so now he knows. And, you know, to me, that's what us other associations have to do. If you get a huge amount, I mean, you're not wedded to that licensed professional. If you think it's too high, go out and get, you know, other bids or go out and get a second opinion if you don't agree with, because your licensed professional is supposed to be helping you get a passing score. So you don't have to put in sprinklers, you know? And we all know that the Marco Polo, and they have 568 units, they paid a little over $5 million to sprinkle their building. Okay, so you can take that as, you know, benchmark, you know, to, to, to, to give you an idea of what it's going to cost to put sprinklers in your building. And, and in the Marco, in Marco Polo case, I mean, unfortunately, I mean, they had this horrific fire, but a lot of the, the, what do you call it, the cost of installing the sprinklers was paid for by the insurance companies. Yeah, so, you know, even, so to me, like I want to say, they got away a little bit easier, you know? And it's at the expense of all of us, you know? Of course we don't have a fire. We don't have a fire. So it comes, you know, it comes from our owners. We have this special, special assessment. I had a quick thought too, you know, in getting into this compliance with the smoke detectors is probably reaching out to all the, the rental management companies to get their owners to comply. I think they need to be educated. Right. And then I think I might try to see if I can make a phone call to it. You know those guys that do the, the dryer ducts? Yeah. Try to see if they can do an added service to install the smoke detectors. Because they have access into those units. Yeah. So that's an easy fix. And then every year when they do clean it, they can check the batteries at the same time. Right. You know, but that would be the only other person that would have a yearly access into some of those condos. Right. You know? So that might, I might reach out to, I think Pure Air is one, but that might be a thought that the AILs can easily ask their own people who does their dryer ducts to see if they can do that install. As an added service. We're kind of running out of time right now, but one last shot I want to get to our audience is we found out that there are a lot of people who are upset with the ordinance. And I've been telling people who call me directly, hey, where were you back in 2018 when we were fighting with the mayor, right? And we had all these hearings. And so if we had the cloud, and think of it, think of all the people who live in condos. If we had the cloud, in other words, if we had people calling their council members and saying vote no for the mayor of Caldwell's, ordinance 19-4, we wouldn't have be having this conversation today, right? And so, and condos are notorious for not allowing politicians or elect candidates into their buildings. I think, hey, if you want to avoid these kinds of things, you got to become best friends with your elected officials, which means next year is an election year and we're going to have people who are going to, and Carol Fukunaga, who represents Makiki and part of Kakaako and downtown where most of the condos are, she's term limited, she can't run. We got to make sure that whoever gets her seat is condo friendly. Her term ends next year, right? 20-22, yep. 22, yep. So November, so there's going to be a new, there's going to be an election. She's going to be, a person's going to be elected for her seat and for council district eight, which is my district, which is Pearl Ridge, Pearl City. And so there's lots of condos out there. So I'm going to ask that same question of candidates and what I'm going to do is encourage condominiums to open their doors, have coffee hours, invite your candidates in and become their best friends because let me tell you, if they know that you're interested and when it comes time for them to vote on a special, all you have to do is email them, call them and say, hey, vote no for this bill. Oh, yes for that bill. Then we wouldn't be having these Zoom meetings and meetings with the fire department. And because you saw what they said, they said like, I know we're not going to change the matrix. That meeting was so powerful. I am so glad Zoom is around, you know? It was powerful. So I think we're near our end. So I want to thank you everybody for joining us today. And we're going to have more, probably more conversations on this Riverside in the future as we progress further. So thank you, Jane, for taking time out of your day to join me today. And we will see everybody, we'll be back here again next week Thursday for another topic. So thank you everybody and have a good rest of your day. Thank you, Jane.