Code Crackdown Complicates A Dream

At 33, Antonio Contreras is watching hair turn white.

He blames zoning rules that have landed him and other small-business and property owners in trouble in the Annex neighborhood.

Contreras moved from Mexico to New Haven 18 years ago. He has run his own auto body shop and used car dealership in the Annex since 2016. He said his hair transformation stems from the stress of navigating city zoning and permitting regulations in a language, and a culture, that he still sometimes struggles to understand.

Contreras was one of 10 property owners cited for a variety of code violations by the city’s Building Department and the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative (LCI) after the city conducted its latest interdepartmental neighborhood sweep in the Annex during the week of July 16. The city has conducted similar neighborhood sweeps in Fair Haven and Newhallville, where different department heads and city personnel fan out through a neighborhood, identify various structural and quality-of-life concerns such debris-strewn lawns, unlicensed junkyards, and illegal dwelling units, and then issue citations with the hope of improving public safety and bringing more properties, and property owners, up to city code.

Contreras received three citations from the city’s Building Department for illegally converting a garage into an auto body shop, illegally converting a residential space into an office, and failing to follow the conditions of a special exception he received for his used car dealership.

Now, he said, he’s considering moving his family and his business down to Florida.

“I want to spend money here,” he said about New Haven. ​“I don’t want to go no place.”

But, he said, if he, his lawyer, and city officials can’t make things work for his business on Farren Avenue, then he may just have to pick up and leave.

“We’re working with him right now,” city Building Official Jim Turcio said about Contreras. ​“He hasn’t followed though with what he was approved for. We’re working with him.”

Code Violations

On July 19, city Assistant Building Inspector James Eggert visited Contreras’ auto body shop, Anthony’s Auto Sales LLC, at 136 Farren Ave. According to city land records, he found a multiplicity of city code violations at both 136 Farren and at Contreras’s adjacent properties at 126 Farren and 140 Farren.

One July 23 notice sent from the Building Department to Contreras indicates that Eggert found a garage illegally converted into an auto body facility without the required permits or approvals at 126 Farren.

“Secondly,” the notice reads, ​“exhaust fans are venting contaminants into the surrounding neighborhood endangering public safety and welfare. Finally, electrical work has been conducted in an unapproved manner such that electrical power for the garage has been illegally fed from the adjoining property.” The notice orders Contreras to immediately cease use of the 126 Farren facility as an auto body shop, and pull the necessary permits with the Building Department.

A second July 23 notice from the Building Department calls out Contreras for illegally converting a room in his 140 Farren home into a commercial office space without the required permits.

A third Building Department notice, this one hand-delivered on Aug. 3, indicates that city Zoning Officer Laurie Lopez found that Contreras was operating a used car lot, body shop, automotive storage, and junkyard at 136 Farren without the appropriate approvals.

The notice references a special exception that Contreras received from the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) on June 14, 2017 that permitted him to run a used car dealership where a maximum of five vehicles for sale are kept on the premises at one time in a BA (Business) zone. That special exception, however, came with the following conditions:

• Contreras had to limit the number of used cars for sale on premises to five at a time.
• He had to reduce the number of marked parking spaces in a revised site plan.
• The property could not be used for a for-hire towing service or for the storage of vehicles not being actively repaired or sold on-site.
• A site plan showing site layout, drainage features, parking, landscaping, signage and lighting accompanied by floor plans had to be submitted to and approved by the City Plan Commission.

The notice says that Contreras’s permission from the BZA will become null and void one year after the effective date of the decision if the granted relief is not recorded in the city land records within 120 days of the date of publication of BZA’s special exception. It will also become null and void if Contreras does not pull the necessary construction permits and if construction is not ​“diligently pursued.”

“As of the last inspection,” the notice reads, ​“conditions set forth in your approvals have not been met nor have all approvals been recorded within 120 days of the date of publication of approval.”

The notice also reads that the July 19 inspection revealed a number of unregistered vehicles and other auto repair equipment at 136 Farren, therefore rendering the property an unlicensed junkyard: or a property where ​“materials that are used, salvaged, scrapped, or reclaimed but are capable of being reused in some form” are stored or sold.

Turcio said the building officials found 85 cars, one motorcycle, and one tow truck on Contreras’s properties when they visited on July 19.

“And he’s only allowed five cars for sale, his employees’ cars, and whatever he’s working on,” Turcio noted.

“They Making Me Sick”

In an interview at his house-turned-office at 140 Farren, Contreras said he has been working with the city for nearly three years in trying to get the necessary permits, site plans, and approvals to run his auto body repair shop and used car dealership.

“Three years they give me a hard time,” he said. Pointing to a box filled with ten rolled up site plans, he said that every time he follows one city order, he hears back from a city official that he needs to change something else.

“They making me sick,” he said.

A native of Puebla, Mexico, Contreras moved to New Haven when he was 15. He has now spent more of his life in this city than in his birth country. He said he has a wife, four children, a business, and five different properties in the city: the three on Farren Avenue, one on Russell Street, and one on Rosette Street. He said he pays around $14,000 each year in property taxes to the city.

He called his Farren Avenue business a boon for both the residents he employs and for the nearby corner store that sees an uptick in business whenever his customers drop off a car for repair or his employees clock out for a lunch break.

“They raised taxes; we didn’t complain,” he said about the recent 11 percent city property tax hike. He said he wants to make money in New Haven and then invest that money back into this community.

As for the code violations, he said he struggles to understand why the city scrutinizes every change he would like to make to improve his business.

He said the conversion of 140 Farren into an office is only temporary, until he can move the office into one of the lower-ceilinged bays in his garage at 136 Farren. But he can’t do that, he said, until he finishes building an additional two bays in the back of 136 Farren, which he hopes to equip with at least two more lifts, allowing him to store and repair cars inside the garage. He currently only has one lift in one bay of his 136 Farren garage.

On July 19, 2017, then City Plan Director Karen Gilvarg signed off on Contreras’s site plan application for expanding his auto body shop at 136 Farren by adding new car repair bays to the rear of the building. That site plan also included the construction of a new 1,100 square-foot tire and auto parts retail store at 126 Farren, which Contreras also owns. Turcio also signed off on that approved site plan application on June 21, 2017.

Contreras saod he hasn’t been able to move as quickly as he would have liked on the construction of the rear garage bays because of the expense of the operation, and the limited money he makes from only being able to sell five used cars at a time.

“Give me more cars for sale,” he said in response to what he would like the city to do. ​“The more cars I sell, the more money I get. The more cars I sell, the more money to the city.”

He said his site can likely fit 40 used cars for sale, instead of just five. He said before the city cracked down on the five car-maximum, he was selling three cars a week. Now, he says, he sells two a month. He said he used to have six people working for him. Now he only has two.

“I feel discrimination to me,” he said, arguing that the city should be doing everything it can to ensure his business thrives.

He took off his baseball hat and showed a patch of prematurely graying hairs. He said his hair has started going white with all the stress from dealing with the city.

As for running electrical power from his garage at 136 Farren to a storage space at 126 Farren, Contreras argued, he said he should be able to share electricity between the two locations because he owns both properties. He said he hired an electrician from UI to come and do the work, and that he got the necessary sign off from the city’s building department to have the 136 Farren feeder connected to the 126 Farren garage back in March 2017. But now, he said, the city says the electrical work is not permitted. He said the city cut his power for two weeks, and only restored it on Friday.

“People who eat rice and beans, people who eat steak, we everybody all the same,” he said. He said he wants to continue to live and work in New Haven, and continue contributing to the economy of Farren Avenue.

But, he said, his wife has family in Florida, and he and his family may just move down there and try to start a new business if he can’t get things to work in New Haven. He said he’s hired Branford lawyer Ray Lemley to help figure out exactly what permits he needs, which city codes he is in violation of, and how he can make his Farren Avenue properties square with the city.

City Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson said he is assigning someone on his team to work with Contreras and other Farren Avenue business owners to ensure that they know what they need to do to be up to code and to be able to keep their operations in the city. He said the Harp administration’s stepped-up efforts to enforce city codes is part of a ​“broken-windows” strategy to promote clean and safe neighborhoods.

Rotting Porches And Dilapidated Garages

The Building Department and LCI also issued code violation notices to nine other Annex property owners for a variety of building code violations discovered during the July sweep. Many of those violations involved rotting porches and dilapidated garages.

The Building Department sent a July 18 notice to Laurence V. Busillo at 117 Farren Ave. about unsafe and deteriorated support members on his front porch.

It sent a July 20 notice to Javier Martinez about rotting front porch headers, columns and framing at 111 Farren Ave.

At Robert Miller’s property at 176 Fairmont Ave., the department found a collapsed rear accessory structure and a front porch deemed unsafe, and that was being repaired without the required permits.

At 99 Pardee St., the department cited Mushka and Menachem Levitin for the property’s collapsed rear garage. It found two more deteriorated garages behind Frank Suraci’s property at 300 Quinnipiac Ace and behind Johana Rodriguez’s property at 192 Quinnipiac Ave.

At 253 Quinnipiac Ave., LCI cited property owners Erick and Floria Angulo for illegally turning their basement into a rental unit.

“The basement dwelling unit is illegal and presents a serious hazard to the health and safety of the occupants,” LCI’s July 26 notice reads.

On Aug. 3, the Building Department issued a notice to Guillermina Luna for running an illegal autobody shop at 120 Farren Ave.

And at 97 Fairmont Ave., the Building Department cited Margaret Ottenbreit for rotted front porch headers and frames in front of two of the building’s three entrances.

The department also cited Ottenbreit for having exposed electrical wires in front of one of those unit entrances. Ottenbreit’s property manager, who identified himself only as Chris, said the wires were not electrical, but just some metal chords that must have gotten caught in the porch’s frame as the last tenants were moving out.

He pulled the cord down from the porch frame and held it in his fist to show that it wasn’t electrical. He also said that he plans on tearing down all three rotted porches at the property, and then reinstalling them within 30 days to meet city code.

On Monday, Turcio said he hadn’t yet heard anything from the property owner or manager about their plans to tear down and reinstall the porches. He said he hopes they pull the necessary construction permits before they begin the work.