San Diego city officials Friday moved all employees out of an asbestos-contaminated high rise that the city leased three years ago for $6.4 million a year, hours after county regulators formally recommended that the building not be occupied.
The city’s Chief Operating Officer Kris Michell issued the evacuation order for the former Sempra Energy headquarters building on Ash Street, even though she said in a memo to workers that the building is safe.
“Since August, the city has conducted more than 230 air-monitoring tests at the 101 Ash,” the memo states. “… While the air tests confirm there are no harmful airborne risks, city leadership has decided to temporarily relocate employees from this building in an abundance of caution.”
The one-page memo is the city’s response to the county Air Pollution Control District, which on Thursday wrote a demand letter to the city, saying that people should not be working inside the building due to an ongoing asbestos violation.
“Since the debris was located in an area accessible to city employees, this constitutes a public nuisance,” states the Air Pollution Control letter, which was addressed to the San Diego Fire-Rescue medical director and deputy COO Johnnie Perkins.
“Please be advised that the District’s practice is to share public nuisance violations involving asbestos with the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.”
It was not immediately clear how many city employees are being affected by the evacuation order or when the building might be safe for workers to move back in.
Last month, Perkins announced a staggered move-in schedule for up to 1,100 workers. The property was opened to the public on Monday.
City spokeswoman Christina Chadwick said late Friday that more information would be released next week.
The city has been the subject of the asbestos violations since August, when remodeling work on the leased high rise was suddenly halted.
City officials decided to restart the renovation work in September and proceeded with moving hundreds of employees into the building beginning last month, despite the continuing asbestos violation.
The city did not announce the evacuation decision. Instead, a spokeswoman for Mayor Kevin Faulconer confirmed the evacuation late Friday after The San Diego Union-Tribune inquired about it.
The 19-story building at 101 Ash Street, just north of City Hall, has been the subject of repeated problems since the city agreed to lease the former Sempra Energy headquarters in 2016.
The tenant improvements that were originally predicted to be a $10,000 power scrubbing have ballooned into a $30 million renovation project, including construction work that led to the repeated asbestos exposures.
The city has been paying almost $540,000 a month for the past three years — about $18,000 a day —for a vacant building.
Perkins has maintained that the 20-year agreement the city signed three years ago for the Sempra Energy building was going to save the city tens of millions of dollars, despite the delays and sudden evacuation, due to the rising cost of leasing downtown office space.
The city also is being sued by a group of 20 employees who claim they were exposed to asbestos while they worked in another city-leased building nearby known as the Executive Complex.
