Portland City Council Quietly Dissolves Unreinforced Masonry Work Group

 

by Aaron Kirk Douglas
HFO Marketing Director

After a long history of stops, starts, and missteps, the City of Portland dropped its attempts to mandate seismic retrofits of Unreinforced Masonry (URM) buildings at a City Council meeting Wednesday.  

Even before 2015, the City Council had assembled a task force that sought to force owners of unreinforced masonry buildings to retrofit during the middle of a Council-declared housing emergency.

2018
The mandate forced URM owners into a quandary. They had to decide whether to tear down and/or rebuild when the City was offering no financial support or incentives for making the retrofits. While the proposed timeline was relatively long (about 15 years) for retrofits, the mandate nearly ended many banks' willingness to finance lending on URM properties in Portland. 

In June of 2018, rather than adopting the seismic retrofit mandates, the City Council decided to study the issue for another year. Then, in September of 2018, they ordered URM owners to post signage by March 1st notifying people entering URM buildings that it would be unsafe in an earthquake. Warnings of a URM owner lawsuit in November of 2018 and a protest by the NAACP in January of 2019 did nothing to persuade the council against moving forward with its placard requirement. 

Instead, the city announced enormous fines for failure to post the signage. 

2019
In February of 2019, in response to the filing of the previously threatened lawsuit against the City of Portland, Federal Court Judge John V. Acosta issued a 60-day injunction on the URM signage requirement. Soon after the injunction, the City of Portland mailed letters to URM owners ordering compliance with the placard order. 

Shortly after, in April 2019, Judge Acosta ruled the City of Portland had violated the restraining order and required it to send a letter of retraction to the owners. A hearing began May 14 on the lawsuit for a preliminary injunction. 

On May 21, 2019, following the City Attorney's closing argument at trial, the Judge was unimpressed with the City's reasoning for the placards. On May 30, 2019, he issued a preliminary injunction against the City. Subsequently, Judge Acosta ordered the City of Portland to pay attorney's fees--ultimately amounting to $350,000--and mandated that the placard ordinance be repealed and ordering that Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Jo Anne Hardesty appear in Federal Court if the City Council failed to repeal the law by October. 

The City's "Official List"
Throughout the process, a complicating factor was the city's compilation method of its official list of URM buildings. 

During the two-day trial in 2019, URM building owners learned in testimony exactly how buildings ended up on the City's "official" list:

• From 1990 to 1993, the City of Portland had three Portland State University students conduct the survey throughout three summers. 
• The students were not the same each summer and conducted their official survey on foot. 
• The areas only included downtown, and the exact perimeter is unknown
• The city did not survey buildings on the east side, Multnomah Village, St. Johns, or other areas
• The students eyeballed a building and checked a box. 
• Students did not realize that the list would be used 27 years later as the City of Portland's official URM list, nor did they know that by accidentally checking the wrong box, they could impact real people. 
• They had no significant training for the job, and there was no field manual. 
• Their work was "spot-checked" by an actual engineer.
• The project had no budget.

Challenging a building's placement on the list by the PSU students' untrained eyes came with a high price. In February of 2019, McMenamins legally challenged the fact that its Crystal Ballroom was on the URM list because it had already completed seismic upgrades. McMenamins eventually won, but not without spending thousands of dollars on attorney's fees. 

2020
In May 2020, the City of Portland removed its list of URM buildings from the Internet. 

In October, the City officially disbanded the URM Task Force. Now Portland's URM owners are contemplating whether to file suit over the existence of the list itself. They rightly fear that it could be trotted out once again as an "expert and definitive list," which could lead to yet another court battle and the dissipation of even more public tax dollars as reimbursement for plaintiffs' attorney fees.