Lawmaker calls for changes after Berkeley balcony collapse
A key state legislator promised Tuesday to “change the law” that keeps California regulators from learning about multimillion-dollar legal settlements involving construction companies, such as the one that built the Berkeley apartment complex where six people died in a balcony collapse.
State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, who chairs the Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee, said Tuesday that he sponsored legislation four years ago to allow plaintiffs to report legal settlements to the contractors board that would otherwise be cloaked from disclosure under secrecy agreements.
The fact that state regulators learned about Segue’s past legal difficulties only after the rotted-out Berkeley balcony collapsed June 16, killing six people and injuring seven, was absurd, Hill said.
When you have a bad actor, there needs to be disclosure, transparency and reporting to the licensing board,” Hill said, promising to introduce legislation “to require that type of reporting.
Hill’s call for change came the same day that attorneys for Segue Construction went to court, accusing Berkeley officials of allowing key evidence in the collapse to be jeopardized when the city had a second rotted deck removed from the apartment complex at 2020 Kittredge St.
The Pleasanton company made the claim as part of a request for a temporary restraining order related to Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley’s criminal probe into the collapse.
The company’s attorneys said Berkeley had botched the removal of a balcony directly beneath the fifth-floor deck that collapsed during a party.
City officials said an investigation showed that like the balcony that failed, the laminated-wood support beams of the removed deck had rotted from exposure to water.
Had it been kept intact, the balcony “could have been used for accident reconstruction purposes to determine the source and cause of water intrusion” on the balcony that collapsed, they wrote.
Some experts contacted by The Chronicle questioned the removal decision, saying the balcony could have been braced and that as long as it was intact, it could have provided clues into how water was able to destroy the balcony that failed.
Segue is seeking a restraining order “to ensure no evidence related to this tragic accident is altered, inspected, tested, or destroyed without allowing Segue to observe and participate in that process,” the company said in a statement.