Escondido Sues City Hall Contractors : Construction: City manager says the complaint over defects in workmanship is fairly routine. Negotiations are continuing.

Escondido has filed a complaint in Superior Court against the contractors of its 3-year-old, $17-million City Hall, citing isolated cases of defective work that have resulted in cracking stucco walls, crumbling tiles and leaking windows, the city attorney said Monday.

The complaint filed March 20 alleges negligence and misrepresentation by at least nine contractors involved in the construction.

“The basic issues involve problems that we’ve experienced with tile on the Parkview Conference Room and leaks that we’ve experienced around some of the windows and doors,” City Atty. David Chapman said.

The announcement comes on the heels of complaints in Oceanside, where city officials have threatened suit against the contractor of its year-old, $33-million Civic Center. Officials there complain of leaking ceilings, cracked walkways, poorly fitted doors and missing railings.

Chapman said repairs to Escondido City Hall could amount to a quarter of a million dollars or more and that negotiations with the contractors will continue. A trial for the case is still a year or two away, he said.

Despite the defects in construction, Chapman said, “we did get what we paid for. . . . I think the people very much got full value from this building.”

He said the award-winning City Hall’s size and complexity make the current situation “not that unusual or distressing. New construction, new buildings have problems, and you work those through.”

“The lawsuit was filed to protect our time limits, and we filed it based on all of our information that we had at the time,” Chapman said. “And, in this kind of case, sometimes you learn the most after you file it.”

The city attorney’s office drew criticism last year when it lost on a technicality a $500,000 lawsuit over repairs to the city library’s roof. The city filed that suit in 1989, eight years after the library had opened, and the court ruled that it had waited too long.

Partly in response to that loss, the city has hired the Solana Beach law firm of Daley & Heft to represent the city in the current case because the city attorney’s office lacks the expertise, Chapman said.

“There are limits in terms of our experience and ability to do things in-house,” Chapman said, citing his office’s primary purpose of defending the city, not acting as a plaintiff.