What Happens When a Fire Inspector Points Out His City’s Selective Safety Enforcement? He Gets Extinguished.

Some of the more serious violations Jim Llewellyn found were in Miami Beach’s own fire houses. Photo by Margaret Griffis.

By Rebecca Wakefield

Llewellyn, a city firefighter since 1984, worked from 2002 to 2005 as a city fire inspector. And it didn’t take the burly, mustachioed fireman long to discover the many problems hidden in the hotels, clubs, condos and even in Miami Beach public buildings.

Actually, the problems were not so much hidden as ignored — in some cases, Llewellyn said, they had been neglected for decades. “I started going into buildings and saying ‘Hey, this is a mess in here,’” he said. “It was all kinds of things, like electrical problems, that had been there for years.”

He pointed out these issues to his superiors, and, initially, they were supportive. But, Llewellyn said, management became less friendly as he became more persistent.

He saw himself as vigilant about the codes. His bosses saw him as a fire safety vigilante and transferred the troublemaker out of the inspection division and back onto a truck. This summer, Llewellyn filed a lawsuit claiming the city violated the Florida Whistle-Blower’s Act.

Llewellyn believes the trouble began when he started aggressively going after city buildings with fire hazards. That embarrassed and inconvenienced city officials, who then pressured his supervisors to lock down the loose cannon.

They should have been embarrassed.

Llewellyn cited numerous examples in his suit, most stemming from issues that occurred in 2004 and 2005. Faulty fire alarms and other problems at the Scott Rakow Youth Center required a fire watch that cost the city $17,000. The ever-plagued Bass Museum had fire alarm problems for months. The Community Center Auditorium and Little Theater had electrical hazards and blocked sprinkler heads. The public works building was a veritable death trap, with fire alarms that hadn’t worked in four or five years, corroded sprinklers, electrical hazards and hazardous storage of various materials.

But, according to Llewellyn’s suit, the fire department itself had three fire stations with fire code violations. Station 3 had problems with its fire alarms. Station 2 racked up documented violations over the course of several years that included bad alarms, locked or blocked exits, missing smoke detectors, electrical hazards and a lack of proper fire ratings. Station 1 had severe safety problems in late 2005 because the city renovated the building while the firefighters were using it.

Of course, Llewellyn also tackled problems in many privately owned buildings, many of which belonged to wealthy, politically connected people unappreciative of his attentions. In 2004, former SunPost columnist A.C. Weinstein wrote about one of Llewellyn’s worst cases — a building that was being used as an auto repair garage and a paint booth with an illegal living unit on the ground floor and unsafe living units above the garage. Llewellyn faced all kinds of pressure, he wrote, because then-Commissioner Luis Garcia and the city manager’s chief of staff went to bat for the property owner and made the inspector’s life hell.

Llewellyn has reams of evidence to support his claims — easily more than 1,000 pages of inspection reports, internal city e-mails, letters, performance reviews, memos, photos and other documents, all painstakingly sorted and separated with color-coded tabs. These documents provided some insight into how the situation steadily escalated, as Llewellyn pushed for changes.

From Praised to Razed

Llewellyn can be direct, relentless and impolitic. Yet, his e-mail trail shows that Llewellyn went from being a praised member of the team, whose reform suggestions were supported by at least some managers, to a problem worker described by his supervisor as a burn-out case with “obsessive, hostile and often paranoid behavior.”

In his opinion, management wanted the inspectors to do a good job inspecting as many buildings as possible without getting bogged down in any real trouble. But Llewellyn consistently argued that the fire inspectors needed more and better training, and random quality assurance reviews of their inspections, rather than mandates to meet inspection quotas. He also accused “members of the Miami Beach administration” of selectively enforcing the safety code in buildings owned by the city and certain privileged individuals.

“They didn’t want to really solve the problems,” he said. “They said, ‘Let’s just go for the numbers.’”

The fire department — which employs 209 firefighters, plus lifeguards and office personnel, with an annual budget of roughly $45 million — has only seven inspectors to conduct all of the city’s annual building reviews.

Last year, they performed some 2,700 inspections and generated about $20,000 in fines, not including those assessed by the special master process. In just the first six months of this year, they have already completed about 1,500 inspections. Assuming an equal workload, that means each inspector performed 386 inspections last year and, potentially, could perform 420 this year. Factoring in weekends, sick days and vacations, each inspector would have to clear several inspections every workday.

If lots of buildings have lots of safety problems, that means lots of filing of lots of paperwork, which sometimes is the bottom line when it comes to budget allocations. Last year, 717 violations went through the city’s special master process, which can take anywhere from weeks to months or longer, depending, in part, on the cooperation of the property owner.

By the way, Llewellyn is not the only Miami Beach firefighter who believes the fire department is not doing all it could to protect residents, tourists and employees from fire hazards. Three other firefighters — who are either current or former fire inspectors — echoed Llewellyn’s sentiments, but asked to remain anonymous because they fear reprisals from management. Each of them said the quota system and the lack of quality assurance reviews encourage fire inspectors to do their jobs quick and dirty, rather than right.

“We don’t get any training, or very little,” one firefighter complained. “I try to do the best I can and come up with a lot of violations. There are other people doing it and finding almost nothing. They turn their face.”

This firefighter said management questions those who are most vigilant about inspections about why they aren’t meeting their quotas. “I feel like if you do a better job, they question you more,” the firefighter said. “There are cases where they are closed without violations being fixed. Nothing’s going to change until the shit hits the fan.”

Another firefighter emphasized that poorly maintained buildings can be major hazards for firefighters responding to emergency calls. “It’s a danger to the public and a danger to firefighters,” the former inspector said. “When we go into fires, we can’t see loose wires or a ceiling coming down that could become a fire trap. It hasn’t happened yet, thank God, but I think it will.”

The Buck Stops Where?

It wasn’t easy talking to the fire department about all this.

Assistant Chief Edward Del Favero said he was “raring to go” to refute Llewellyn’s claims, but first had to check with the city attorney because of the lawsuit. Fire Marshal Sonia Machen didn’t return voice mail messages for comment.

Later, Del Favero offered to sit down in a room with me, Machen, a deputy city attorney and Assistant City Manager Hilda Fernandez — quite an ordeal for a few simple questions. Even Deputy City Attorney Donald Papy said he couldn’t comment because of the lawsuit.

With the exception of Del Favero, who responded as much as he was allowed, everyone else copped out until they learned that other firefighters expressed similar concerns. Then the gang at City Hall ran around trying to figure out what they could say. As of deadline, a written statement from Assistant City Manager Fernandez read thusly: “The City looks forward to the opportunity to present this and other facts that will support our position that the City’s Fire Prevention Enforcement Division is appropriately, fairly and consistently enforcing the established State of Florida Fire Prevention Code, ensuring the safety of our community.”

The state fire marshal’s Fire Prevention Bureau Chief James Goodloe, whose office handled Llewellyn’s complaint about violations in city buildings, said he looked at two city buildings, including the Scott Rakow Youth Center, and found some violations, but none that were life-threatening. “Those violations were put in a report by [Miami Beach Fire Marshal Sonia] Machen for her to follow up on,” he said.

But Goodloe explained that his office of 38 inspectors is mostly tasked with inspecting the state’s 16,000-plus buildings. While local governments are held to the same codes that govern the private sector, the actual enforcement of such is controlled by the local government — unless there’s a major situation that requires the state fire marshal to intervene.

“The state marshal is not empowered to look over their shoulder,” he drawled, sounding a bit like Carroll O’ Connor on In the Heat of the Night. “We don’t have the manpower and resources.”

That’s comforting.