Budget May Doom Seismic Guidelines

A call by the state Seismic Safety Commission that 8,700 unreinforced masonry buildings across the state be retrofitted within five years isn’t expected to go very far in the Legislature.

Executive Director Richard J. McCarthy and the commission’s senior structural engineer, Fred Turner, pointed out this week that post-Proposition 13 laws forbid the Legislature from requiring localities or counties to do anything unless the state agrees to fund it.

The costs of administering such an edict on private building owners would be considerable, officials said, and the state probably doesn’t have the money to pay for the mandate.

Last Friday, reporting to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature on lessons of the magnitude-6.5 San Simeon earthquake of Dec. 22, the 17-member commission called unreinforced masonry buildings the state’s “most dangerous.”

Retrofitting older masonry buildings is not mandated by the state, although a 1986 law strongly advises that communities adopt strict deadlines.

But reaction from both the governor’s office and senior legislators has been cool.

A spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger said the governor’s office was “in the process of reviewing” the commission report, but she remarked, “The Seismic Safety Commission can only make recommendations. They don’t have any teeth in them.”

Meanwhile, Assemblywoman Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro), chairwoman of a select committee on earthquakes and an author of past retrofitting legislation, said that for now, she would not favor going beyond existing legislation leaving it to the counties and cities to act. She said it is already clear that the Legislature hopes they will implement such programs.

The commission report noted that the collapse of an unretrofitted building in Paso Robles was responsible for the two fatalities in the San Simeon earthquake.

Turner noted that twice before, in the mid-1980s, the Seismic Safety Commission had pushed for retrofitting. But one such bill was vetoed by then-Gov. George Deukmejian, and another was severely watered down to ensure that the state was not assuming a new financial burden.

McCarthy and Turner said the commission recognized that, at present, it was mainly up to county governments to adopt retrofitting programs.

Los Angeles County has led the way, with the retrofitting or demolition of 85% of the 14,000 such buildings it once had. Other Southland counties have not done so well. Orange County has taken care of 61% of such buildings, but San Diego County has taken care of only 15%, Riverside and San Bernardino counties 14%, and Kern only 10%.