Hotel Manager Chastises El Segundo Officials

The manager of the Hacienda Hotel has angrily denounced El Segundo officials for making public the results of a city investigation that uncovered more than 70 fire and safety code violations at the landmark hotel.

In a sharply worded letter mailed to city officials this week, Frank Godoy, Hacienda’s vice president and manager, called the city’s action “wasteful, unprofessional and unwarranted.”

The 640-room hotel, which city officials acknowledged is safe to occupy, has been subjected to “great and irreparable damage, which could have easily been avoided had the city chosen to accurately and fairly explain all the facts involved,” the letter states.

“The tone of the letter was rather strong,” Godoy said in an interview Wednesday. “That is because we are basically fed up with their attitude.”

Fire Chief Robert Marsh said Wednesday that he would not comment on the letter until he has studied it. “The letter in my mind was emotional and we are going to deal with the facts,” he said.

Marsh said in an interview last week that fire inspectors had uncovered the 74 violations after a lengthy investigation. Although the hotel is considered safe to occupy, the chief has said that he and other city officials have had “mounting concerns over a long period of time over some areas we believe need to be updated.”

Marsh has said that fire officials do not classify the code violations as minor. El Segundo City Manager Fred Sorsabal said Wednesday that some of the violations date back to 1986.

“A lot of this stuff has been going on for years,” Sorsabal said. “They say they are going to do something, and then it isn’t done.”

Godoy’s letter specifically accuses the city of releasing the contents of a Dec. 15 letter that outlined the violations before Hacienda officials had an opportunity to reply. The city had given the hotel until Jan. 23--last Monday--to respond to the findings and provide a timetable for correcting the violations.

As a result, Godoy writes, much misleading and erroneous information contained in the letter was publicly released. According to Godoy, the city’s letter does not mention that hotel officials have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars during the past 18 months on various fire and safety improvements.

Additionally, Godoy wrote, the city’s letter fails to acknowledge that the hotel, in early December, submitted architectural plans to the city aimed at correcting some of the fire and safety violations. Those plans have yet to be approved by the city’s Planning Department.

Godoy’s letter also asserts that many other items that the city considers violations are, in fact, not violations because the city’s fire and safety codes have been changed over the years since the hotel was built. As such, the hotel is under no legal obligation to comply with some codes.

During an interview, Godoy, who has estimated that 30% of the 74 violations were corrected before the hotel received the city’s letter last month, accused El Segundo officials of “rehashing old items.”

“My understanding was that everything was moving forward in a positive direction,” Godoy said.

City officials have said that many of the violations will be corrected once the hotel finishes installing sprinklers in all of its four buildings. The south and west towers already have sprinklers, and hotel officials say they expect to have sprinklers in the other buildings by mid-1990.

Marsh has said that while some of the violations are technical in nature, others will require significant structural work to correct, such as inadequate fire walls, faulty insulation around electrical wiring and several exits that need to be widened or relocated.