Lawyers claim Adelaide hotel owners are not responsible for the public safety of people outside the building

The owners of the earthquake-prone Adelaide Hotel in Wellington are not legally responsible for the safety of people in the vicinity of the building, their lawyers say.

Auckland-based Lakhi Maa Limited purchased the abandoned Adelaide Hotel in Newtown in 2015, two years after the deadline to complete the strengthening works expired.

The company appeared in Wellington District Court on Wednesday following a request from Wellington City Council for a court order to do the strengthening work itself.

It is the first time that a local authority requests the court order, despite the fact that it is legally authorized to do so if the building owners do not meet the strengthening deadlines or do not advance at “reasonable speed”.

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Lakhi Maa has asked the council for consent of the resources to demolish the building or construct a 50-unit hotel on the site, preserving the façade.

However, you still have to make the payment for the request to continue.

Attorney Kevin Smith said Wednesday that the company’s obligation under the Construction Law was to protect the people who use the facilities, not the people who pass through or around them.

It has not yet been legally determined whether bystanders can also be considered users of the building, but that is unlikely to be the case, Smith said.

“It’s a long arc to suggest that a user of that building is someone passing by on the road.”

Work has also been done to reinforce the masonry on the outside of the building, which means that now only the interior poses a risk, he said.

“Even if [the definition] was expanded to include road users, I think his honor might find that there is no safety risk anyway, ”said Judge Chris Tuohy.

The city council wants to upgrade the building to at least 34 percent of the New Construction Standard (NBS) and recoup the costs from the owner.

You have the right to do so if a court order is granted under the Building Law.

However, his attempt to obtain the warrant was delayed Wednesday, and Smith successfully requested more time to prepare the company’s case.

He said the matter was a complex legal issue that had not been explored before in New Zealand, and that there were many loopholes that still needed to be addressed.

These include the lack of prior court decisions to refer to and issues of public safety.

He wanted time to research relevant decisions in other jurisdictions like California and Japan.

Smith estimated that the updates would cost about $ 6 million, a figure that was too expensive for the company and that would ultimately fall on taxpayers.

Tuohy also raised questions about whether the order could be granted without the council specifying what work it wanted to do.

However, council attorney Nick Whittington said the council had the right under the Building Law to seek a court order without specifying what improvements it intended to make.

It would have to do preliminary design work before starting the updates, and it needed a court order to do so, it said.

“We will not prevent the owner from obtaining consent of the resources to do the work himself. The problem here is that we’ve been waiting for five years and it hasn’t happened. “

Whittington questioned the cost estimate of $ 6 million, which he said was the cost of bringing the building to 70 percent of the building code. The property’s value was just $ 2.5 million, he said.

Tuohy postponed the “partially heard” case until November 2.