Dallas moved city workers into an unpermitted building. So why is the truth so elusive?

We had hoped that the Dallas City Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on General Investigating & Ethics would get to the bottom of how city permitting workers were moved into an unpermitted building. What council committee members received from city staff was obfuscation, incomplete timelines and conflicting explanations. Quite properly, committee members have asked the city auditor to investigate.

Inexplicably, city officials didn’t obtain final occupancy approval for Dallas’ new permitting office along Stemmons Freeway before workers moved into the 11-story tower late last year. Employees were ordered back to their old office in Oak Cliff months later, and the new building was closed after fire and safety violations were revealed.

But last week, Assistant City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry provided a different reason to the council committee, one that fails the smell test. Al-Ghafry said he decided to close the building and return staff to their former offices after a few employees wandered from their floor to other unfinished floors. He said the building had a valid temporary certificate of occupancy and that the employees weren’t in an unsafe building. “In full transparency and confidence, there wasn’t any life and safety issues that caused me to do this,” Al-Ghafry told the committee.

Well sort of. Only the fifth floor where the permitting employees were located had a temporary occupancy permit, but final approvals from the fire department and other inspectors weren’t obtained before employees moved in. Al-Ghafry previously said employees were warned not to roam beyond the first and fifth floors. However, Development Services Department Director Andrew Espinoza said employees had been working on the second and third floors between January and March. Espinoza also said no employees were disciplined for being on other floors.

Consider this revisionist history. Development Services employees began moving into the building in December. In January, an employee’s spouse filed a complaint with the state fire marshal’s office alleging a series of safety issues with the facility. In February and early April, city fire safety inspection reports discovered fire code violations. Al-Ghafry said employees started moving out of the building on April 9 after it was determined that the fire alarm didn’t sound on all floors.

Al-Ghafry, however, didn’t mention roaming employees in his email to the mayor and council on April 9. Instead, he wrote that “this move [from the new building] is the result of additional facility improvements recently identified at their current location.” He specifically cited additional work needed on the fire suppression system, IT equipment, connectivity, elevators, and other improvements.

It is embarrassingly ironic that the city’s permitting unit, long criticized for failing to deliver construction permits in a timely manner, failed to properly obtain permits for its own building before moving employees into it. More distressing is that grossly inadequate, misleading responses continue to keep us all in the dark about what happened and why, an all too common pattern at City Hall when mismanagement occurs.

Accountability is necessary. The city auditor must unravel the truth and do it quickly.

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