THE COLONADE APARTMENTS
in JENKINTOWN,
PA
OVERVIEW
- For a nutshell overview, please see below.
WHISTLE BLOWER UPDATE
( NOTE :
BCO = Building Code Official . She made sure documents and
permits were in order and inspected the premises. )
NUTSHELL OVERVIEW
The Colonade is a 535 unit
apartment complex consisting of 2 main buildings and at one time
there were thriving commercial establishments and a leasing office, too.
The commercial establishments were gone. The leasing
office met its demise in
a fire very shortly before it's intended transformation was to
begin. (?) The buildings were fraught for years with
fire calls, reports of faulty fire equipment, other faulty emergency equipment, faulty
electric, faulty doors, bursting pipes, rats, mice and you name
it . Those were just some
of the problems that plagued the complex. The once grand
showplace (formerly called the Benson East) was allowed to
slip into complete gross disrepair under the joint
oversight of the Township and the Landlord ( through
his various stacked and "protected" companies), taking longtime tenants on that ride
as it went.
The tenants
sought help from nearly every official imaginable, yet the
conditions persisted. Endless violations were
documented by officials, multiple times --- close to 200
violations at one point, long after the multiple violation
lists should have had officials breathing down their necks to
make it impossible to continue in that fashion. Yet, there
were virtually no fines or penalties ever levied on the Landlord,
despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars absorbed by taxpayers in legal
fees, inspections, document management and production,
certifications, fire calls, reports , meetings and on and on and on -- and despite the conditions
that left tenants frequently without heat, or with too
much heat, without A/C , with broken elevators (despite
people in wheelchairs on upper floors), with burst pipes or brown water from the tap or leaks in their homes and in common areas,
or lack of water altogether, or mold, and more .....
So many
suffered. In 2016 the entire Township was the recipient of
a tax increase due to a 1.1 million dollar shortfall. But
this complex might explain nearly all of it - and other situations like this
also existed . They explain where
the money is going and why increases are needed. A
travesty.
One
Commissioner himself -Steven N. Kline, came to profit directly from this
--- while offering virtually no aid to the tenants
that were living in the conditions he saw ( and that he exacerbated). The Landlord that one
would want fined by the very people who work at the pleasure of
the Commissioner, became the Commissioner's boss. So while
the Commissioner oversees the
Township operations that would be deciding when and how much to
fine the errant
property owner, the Commissioner simultaneously had a leading
role in shepherding through the renovations and had a "loyalty"
to his boss. This got ugly as the Township and the
Landlord's sides disagreed as to what the law required.
One of the main concerns was: "to sprinkler or not to sprinkler"
. This question when posed about a complex that in one 5 year period had a fire
call on an average of once every 8 days should
have been a no brainer. And every current law points to
sprinkling for safety. But you probably know the headaches
all that extra safety poses for a landlord who might have the
sprinklers actually go OFF when there was a fire -- or even
sometimes by accident. The
Commissioner, with responsibilities on both sides of this
argument had what, in my mind, is a severe conflict of
interest. And chose poorly.
To back-track just a bit, how I got involved was that a
tenant found me. Frustrated with the Township's failure to stop
the decline or to protect the residents, she got a laptop and
went to our lovely library - where helpers taught her how to get
on-line and look me up. She invited me and gave me a tour of
what she had to live with. My jaw dropped. I came the next day
with a camera and she toured me through showing as
we gathered permanent evidence of the state of the property
...blinking lights, code violations everywhere in plain sight, outstanding dangers that showed obvious years of
neglect...... THIS was what our Fire Chief Ken Clark ( now
retired) and
Assistant John Rohrer ( elevated to Fire Chief
despite all this) and Code Director Larry Matteo (now retired) were in
charge of ..... and knew about ...... and were
themselves
neglecting. Just as Commissioner Ben Sanchez ( who in 2019
became State Rep) and Board President
Wayne Luker ( retired in 2020) were ignoring........ I was stunned. I
immediately engaged all the major parties but found the
level of cooperation --- even with lives at risk - to be ZERO.
It was nailing jello to a tree to try to get a single
reasonable response. And I made sure
everyone knew about this....Madeleine Dean, Josh Shapiro, all
the Commissioners, Labor and Industry and on and on ....... .
They all actually knew already, yet still there was no partner
in changing it. There was no one to enforce the codes and
laws designed to keep us safe.
Steve Kline in fact was MY Commissioner, so, needless to
say, I had no one to
complain about that to. But as I said I did ensure that the entire Board and Board
President were made aware of the dire situation
there and of the conflicts of interest and their
consequences. Yet it all that fell on deaf ears - and I myself
was maligned publicly ( as were others ) for trying to bring it
up. So it persisted.
I have read
thousands of records but none that showed any serious
concern by Commissioner Kline working for the Landlord or by the
tenants' own Commissioner or by the
Board President for the issues that the
tenants brought forward on their health safety and welfare. I and
many of the residents had begged to have the issues properly
addressed. Others who came to the podium asking about OSHA
issues etc and concern for those inside, were rudely maligned. Despite tools available to the Township, such
as a $1,000 per day fine for each violation, these tools
were not employed -- just threatened. Never used. A lot of saber
rattling, while the transgressions continued. Empty huffing &
puffing .
Many
tenants fled the conditions, many others were evicted or not
renewed. Many, when they tried to withhold their rent, found
themselves taken to court. The same judge heard the same stories
again and again --- yet still this Landlord did not get his due. All of the measures came at great
cost to tenants, for things that were not at all in their control. Court
representation costs were a great deterrent for them to
exert any of their rights and it was more than scary to face
a wealthy landlord without representation, given this landlord's
apparent ability to break all the rules yet suffer no
consequences. The landlord also threatened
eviction, which again was fraught with great cost. Moving
costs . A new damage deposit as an out of pocket expense
with no assurance of getting the old one back....
A
group of residents tried to get legislators and others to come
to their aid. Retaliation legislation was
penned by a local politician, but it did them no good and was
never fully enacted. It was another useless gesture while the
steps that could and should have been taken were ignored. There seemed to be no one to enforce the
many laws that could have been applied. Individual tenants
were left to take on a wealthy, fearless, landlord with a well
paid legal team on a one to one basis
--an
entirely untenable situation. Without local officials to take a
stand for the residents they are supposed to represent,
exactly these kinds of injustices can occur freely, as they did
here.
A class action suit was filed on behalf of the tenants
in November 2015 . That was mishandled and ultimately
failed . But the citizens of Abington --
all its citizens ----- will also
be paying through the nose for all of the actions that were
required at this property and those that as of September
2020 are STILL underway. The actions included among the many
legal actions, even a 5 million dollar lawsuit
and many smaller ones. Filed in some cases,
against the Township
supposedly in a struggle to maintain that sprinklers
would not be needed --- but frankly my personal opinion was that
many were filed as a diversion to side step questions and
investigation into these practices.
The entire process and the
story told in the documents of the renovations, is one that
everyone should read for themselves, There is little more
that can be said except that I, in my own humble opinion, having
read a majority of the documents in the massive volume that
exists in this case, have on going concerns for what the future
of this property may be and for what the future of the Township
may be - given that the Solicitor and Commissioners and so many
of the bad actors are still in their roles ---- or have been
elevated to higher positions in government service. Steve
Kline is head of the Planning Commission at Montgomery County
and is fine letting Township Planners who should be holding
developers to the laws, instead help the developers write
ordinances that violate laws as at the Willow Grove Mall in 2021
-- and the Assistant Fire Marshall was elevated to Fire Marshal
where, again in 2021 , he just OK'ed the Baederwood 244 units
that did not meet code and were designed, somehow, astoundingly,
with an entire side that is unreachable by emergency6 vehicles
so that the developer could squeeze in a few more units.
So because there were no consequences, there is more of the same
thing going on in Abington.
It is up to the citizens to care . And to DO something,
not just shake their heads. I invite you to contact me if you'd
like to be part of "the solution" to this kind of
government. (
lel@abingtoncitizens.com )
If
you believe any part of this, with the exception of my own
opinions on the subject, is incorrect, I urge you to share
that information, so any errors may be corrected .
To be connected in to the information
loop on this topic AND with other tenants both current and former,
if you are an Abington residents, please
send me an email
