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A gas bottle placed in the toilet, a hodgepodge of pipes to the bathroom, and a room filled to the ceiling with trash – that was the inside of the home at 128 Abel Smith St, which burned beyond repair in August.
From the ashes of the 1898 home, listed by Wellington City Council as a heritage building, two problems emerged: It was unclear who owned the home and the council has little power to compel the owners to maintain the designated buildings.
Wellington City Councilwoman Iona Pannett said the problem was due, in part, to bereavement legislation. The Building Act covers dangerous buildings, while the heritage listing is a matter of the Resource Management Act and is under the jurisdiction of the council.
“They don’t quite talk to each other,” he said.
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This meant that the city council waited for people to complain that a building was dangerous, but it had little power to get the owners to make the repairs. Pannett said he would pressure the council to invest more in a fund to help homeowners repair heritage buildings.
The council confirmed that while it can stop the total demolition or the installation of aluminum windows like those in its listed buildings, there was little it could do to force owners to keep them properly maintained.
Supplied
A curious plumbing and water heating arrangement inside 128 Abel Smith St.
That’s little comfort to Jeff Montgomery, whose home adjacent to 128 Abel Smith St property suffered $ 500,000 in damage as a result of the fire. Now he lived in his garage while the repairs were being made, and he can no longer operate a bed and breakfast.
His insurer, AMP, was covering the cost of the damages but not the loss of income, Montgomery said.
AMP declined to say whether it was trying to recover the cost from the owners of 128 Abel Smith St, which was not insured. To further complicate the issue, there is an ongoing dispute over who owns the property.
Supplied
Trash piles up at 128 Abel Smith St.
But Montgomery said his real problem was with the council, which gave the building a heritage list but dropped it into such disrepair.
He supplied Stuff photos inside the building he took about a year ago, after the regular tenants moved in and “homeless people” started using it.
One shows a bottle of barbecue gas heating up a hodgepodge of pipes to the bathroom, another shows daylight through holes in the balcony, and a third shows garbage bags almost to the ceiling of a room.
Supplied / Stuff
Holes in the balcony floor at 128 Abel Smith St.
Even if the council had not been explicitly informed about the issues there, Montgomery said it should have known, given it was a high-profile home at a busy intersection, where northbound city traffic meets State Highway. one.
She wrote to council and councilor Iona Pannett about the issue and received an email from planning director Moana Mackey. She said there had been “general” complaints about issues like noise and graffiti, but there was nothing to suggest it was a dangerous or unsanitary building before the fire.
“While the police may have been informed of persons occupied on the property, the council has not been informed or involved in dealing with any of these matters,” Mackey wrote in an email to Montgomery and Pannett.
“From what we have been able to find in the records and investigations to date, the city council had no knowledge that the building had been left empty or that illegal works had been carried out,” he wrote in the email, dated 25 de September.
