KEVIN RAUCH/FOR THE EXPRESS The rowhouse on Renovo’s 14th Street, which has been deemed unsafe following lengthy legal proceedings, is pictured. Remaining residents must vacate the property.
RENOVO — After a three-year battle between the Renovo Borough and residents and owners of the row homes on 14th Street, Clinton County President Judge Michael F. Salisbury ordered that the last two remaining occupied households must vacate the premises by Sept. 19 at 9 a.m.
The ruling came Thursday afternoon following a court hearing in Lock Haven. The petition orders the remaining residents to vacate the property and authorizes the borough to secure the building to prevent access.
Of the 16 separately owned units, two remain occupied, two have water turned on and nine are on the repository list for unpaid taxes.
After the final two occupied apartments are vacated and property owners clear their belongings, Renovo Borough will board up the structures to ensure that they are not entered. The borough has already begun seeking funding and grants to raze the entire row homes according to Council President Ann Tarantella.
The court found that “substantial evidence in the record supports the board’s findings that the properties are unsafe in violation of 107.2 of IPMC, based on the credited testimony of the Code Officer and Borough Engineer, which owners failed to rebut with credible evidence.” It further ordered the appellants have exhausted their appeals and the finding that the building is unsafe is a final decision.
Renovo Mayor Gene Bruno — who did not take office until January 2022 but has been a strong proponent of cleaning the borough of blight — expressed sympathy for the residents but realized there was no choice.
“No one wants to see anyone displaced from their home, it saddens me for the people,” Bruno said. “It’s a shame that we were not able to do something sooner, before the structure has gotten to this point” he added. Bruno also said that he hopes the aggressive approach that the borough has taken recently with zoning and ordinance issues will prevent something like this happening again.”
The property owners garages will be permitted to stay but they are not allowed to be slept in overnight and to be used as living quarters.
The saga started at the September 2019 Renovo Borough Council meeting when Victor Marquardt, then Property Ordinance Officer and Building Code Enforcement Officer for the borough, informed council and residents in attendance he would be posting the entire row of houses with labels minimally — starting with unsafe/uninhabitable to the most serious of Imminent Hazard designations.
Marquardt explained that night stricter FEMA enforced flood plain requirements went into effect June of 2016 had impacted the decision as well as a recent fire that left two families displaced in the row.
Marquardt further detailed the 2016 decision requires any repairs worth half of the value of the property or higher make it such that structures in a designated special flood area have to make drastic upgrades.
For example, if a vacant house is bought in a repository sale for $500 and a repair of $250 or more is made, that house would have to be elevated 13 feet and/or the mechanicals moved to the 2nd floor. Which, in a row house would be all but impossible, he said.
At that time, Salisbury remanded the eventual appeal and sent it back to the Renovo Board of Appeals after citing the International Property Maintenance Code. A three-member panel consisting of Larry Glenn, Charles Grieb and Eric Fletcher was created. The panel found the structure to be unsafe.
The residents last real hope of being able to stay in the row homes hung on the findings of engineer Jeff Brooks’s. But that 23 page report backed up that the Notice of Unsafe structure tag that Marquardt posted was “completely warranted and totally appropriate.”
With people’s homes involved — which at that time included seven occupied houses — the residents, their attorney Rocco Rosamlia as well as Marquardt and Renovo Borough officials agreed upon making immediate safeguards while a decision was made in summer of 2020.
Appeals followed and a lengthy flow through the court system led to last week’s decision by Salisbury. Since that time five of the seven homes have become vacated.
A fire at 137 14th St. in the summer of 2019 resulted in major damage and smoke and water damage to the 135 and 139 units. But once inside the entire structure it was actually 155 14th St. that posed the most immediate threat, Marquardt had said and the Brooks report confirmed.
Some of the Brooks report reads:
“This building was constructed as one building with 16 vertical apartment units contained within its exterior walls, all separated by common fire walls. It was not built as 16 separate free-standing and independent apartment buildings constructed tight together side by side. This is an important distinction because the load-baring firewalls between each apartment unit also provide for the main structural support of the first floor, second floor, third floor and roof structures of the apartment of each side.
“When there is a multiple floor and roof structure collapse, such as what has already occurred within apartment 155, the structural load capacity of the load bearing fire walls on each side are greatly reduced. The floor joists and roof rafters just rest in pockets of the fire wall and are not physically restrained/connected.
“If either, or both, of these fire walls collapse, they will in turn cause the floors and roof structures that they support in the adjacent apartments to collapse as well. This in turn can destabilize the next fire walls for roof structures in the next apartments and so on throughout the entire building. This is known by structural engineers as progressive collapse, something that is considered and evaluated very seriously in the design of all structures.”
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