New Havener Of The Year

Jim Turcio loved climbing ladders as a kid. He found he still got a kick when he climbed a fire ladder one day this August — then his mood shifted when he looked around him.

The view gave him a new appreciation of the role he took on in New Haven this year. And it changed the lives of hundreds of families.

“Oh my God. I’m climbing ladders again,” Turcio, who in his teens fixed roofs for his father’s construction company, said to himself.

Once at the top, he thought ​“Oh my God” once more, at the slipshod conditions people were living in.

Turcio, New Haven’s building official, climbed the ladder with fellow inspectors to see a roof at Church Street South, the decaying 301-unit federally subsidized apartment complex across from Union Station.

For years city inspectors had found code violations in the complex. But it kept rotting, thanks to blind-eye ​“inspections” by the federal government, which pays the rent there.

Tenants enlisted a legal-aid lawyer named Amy Marx to fight for them. Marx in turn convinced a judge to order Turcio up on the roof of one of the complex’s buildings. Hence the Aug. 6 climb on the ladder.

Turcio saw holes in the roofs. Missing membranes. Sponge-like matting collecting water and sending it throughout the buildings, producing permanent mold that was sickening asthmatic kids and their parents throughout the complex.

Turcio subsequently ordered the complex’s owner, Massachusetts-based Northland Investment Corp., to replace 17 roofs. He and the the city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), spent months condemning apartments and ordering emergency repairs to crumbling stairs, moldy walls, broken porches. Northland put 58 families into hotel rooms while it and the feds worked on a plan to move all 288 remaining families at the complex, for years trapped in substandard living conditions, into safer permanent new homes in coming months.

Church Street South provided the most visible example of how, in 2015, Turcio transformed New Haven’s building department into a dynamo that has spread fear among slumlords as well as upscale developers descending upon New Haven amid a building boom. There were many less visible examples, some redressing years of neglect.

Toni Harp appointed Turcio, an old-school no-nonsense inspector far more at ease citing sections of the building code than attempting to converse with a car-dashboard computer voice, to the position in February with a mandate to step up code enforcement. As a result, Turcio and his 14-member staff have conducted 9,000 building inspections, compared to an average of 6,000 to 7,000 in previous years. They’ve issued $50,000 in fines in the past six months alone for unpermitted work; the previous high for an entire year was $22,000 he said.

Poverty landlords like Mandy Management have been forced to put up tenants in hotels while they scurried to make emergency repairs. So have upscale developers like PMC, owner of the Strouse Adler apartments on Olive Street. Turcio made an initial visit there this month when unlicensed repair work led to flooded apartments. At the time he noticed signs of deeper problems; he returned this week with an emergency order for widespread repairs to correct what he called long-term structural shortcuts from the original renovation of the complex that have compromised its fire safety all these years. Turcio’s order cast an unflattering light not only on the complex’s owners, but on a previous generation of city building inspection that allowed the place to open in the first place.

That was a theme this year under the new Turcio order: Property owners who got away for years with breaking rules suddenly received emergency clean-up orders. One such order required a politically connected junkyard owner to stop using a public street as his private junkyard. Along with a similarly energized new fire marshal, Bobby Doyle, Turcio prepared to do citywide inspections of all commercial facilities along with residential inspections.

Turcio issued an emergency order this month to owners of the Harbour Landing condos, who for years have violated a legal promise to keep open to the public access to the harbor on City Point. Turcio reported this week that the group has hired an architect to draw up plans to repair a damaged boardwalk.

He was back on a lift this Thursday in Wooster Square inspecting a third-floor partial collapse of a building’s exterior, then ordering emergency repairs. (Click on the video to watch.) The day before he ordered emergency repairs at an illegal rooming house declared unsafe on Dixwell Avenue.

Meanwhile, Turcio and his crew spent weekends knocking on thousands of doors of New Haveners owning homes built since 1950. Turcio decided to give them their original house plans, which he had digitized in order to clear room in the cluttered city archives.

Turcio was ubiquitous this year — even while technically on vacation, like when he rushed over to Orange Street for a long overnight overseeing the demolition of a crumbling historic building.

“You just have to ask him once to do something, and it’s done,” Mayor Harp said. ​“He inspires his people to work. He takes the law very seriously. He’s really done a fantastic job. We are benefitting form his talent and from his work ethic.”

“Jimmy is a tireless worker, and he does an outstanding job in his role,” said Annex Alder Al Paolillo Jr. ​“He’s always accessible, diligent and responsive when you call.

Up

In some ways Turcio had been preparing for his current job since he was a kid growing up in Morris Cove and learning his way around a ladder.

“It was a great place to grow up,” Turcio, who’s 57, said of Morris Cove. ​“We were always down at Lighthouse Park playing basketball, jumping off the seawall, going swimming, fishing.”

And helping his dad on construction sites. Building work ran in the family: Grandfather John owned Turcio Builders. Dad Ralph ran a company called R.J. Construction.

By his ninth birthday, Jim was accompanying Ralph to jobs. His parents had noticed, with some alarm, that he would dig tunnels on their own property. ​“They were worried I was undermining the garage. I was better off at the [construction] site, where I could use the shovel” to mix cement.

Dad eventually had Jim pick up a hammer to work on siding, roofing and framing by the time. ​“It was something new every day,” Turcio recalled.

He especially enjoyed working up on the ladder. ​“It’s peaceful. Nobody bothers you up there,” he said.

Turcio spent a lot of time on the ladder when, after graduation from Notre Dame High School, he went to work for Forest Restoration. (His dad by that time had closed up his company to work for the city’s redevelopment agency.)

“The first day, [the boss] had me on a Bosun’s chair in a steeple 100 feet up,” Turcio recalled. The company restored synagogues, churches, flagpoles. The first year the boss brought Turcio to a church in Canaan, Connecticut. ​“Jim,” the boss said. ​“We’ve got to paint the steeple. See you in a couple of weeks.” Which was fine by Turcio.

Public Service

Turcio worked for three construction companies before he decided to follow his dad’s footsteps into city government work. He started out in 1996 as a technical compliance officer in the city building department. He moved to LCI, city government’s neighborhoods anti-blight agency, where he took a lead in exposing out-of-town real-estate flippers who were committing mortgage fraud at the expense of struggling neighbors, helping to land some of the flippers in jail.

He leaped at the opportunity this year to take the helm of the building department. He aimed to put to use lessons he’d learned from previous bosses while pushing the needle forward, expanding inspections as well as follow-ups. He urged his inspectors to focus not just on the inspection at hand, but on what they saw around them, as well, to notice other neglected problems.

“It’s the best staff in the city, without a doubt. It’s the best building department in the state,” Turcio boasted.

He had less kind words for some of the property owners that staff has caught up with this year. He takes their violations personally. He said too many of the building owners — at least one every week — violate Turcio’s First Law Of Dealing With The City: ​“Don’t lie.”

“I didn’t know I needed a permit,” they’ll tell him.

Just quoting those words in an interview this week ticked Turcio off.

“You’re building a whole house! Look, you made a mistake. Admit you made a mistake. Let’s move on.”

If not, expect to see the city’s building official again — this time, with a ladder.

Click on or download the above audio file to listen to Turcio look back on the year in an interview along with LCI’s Rafael Ramos on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”

Previous New Haveners of the Year:
• 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison
• 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker
• 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski
• 2011: Stacy Spell
• 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr.
• 2009: Rafael Ramos
• 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur