Minneapolis businesses protest possible fire-safety fees

With their sales slumping, Minneapolis business owners are chafing under the potential burden of two new city fees, including one that the City Council may impose today.

That proposal would charge the owners of the city's 5,800 commercial buildings a fee ranging from $79 to $910 annually for a fire-safety inspection they'd get once every few years. Because fire stations and businesses are unequally matched, some buildings would get inspected more often than others, a fire official said.

The fee has languished in council committees for months. Some council members suggest the proposal has more to do with raising money to keep firefighters employed in the face of budget cuts than with keeping buildings safe.

Also under consideration is a $6,000 annual fee that would affect an estimated 100 buildings. It would be charged against vacant commercial buildings and is mostly intended to mirror a fee imposed several years ago on vacant and boarded-up houses to recover the city's cost of monitoring them.

Some business owners argue that it would put them in a bind when the economy inhibits their efforts to rent their commercial spaces. But the proposal, which has been in a committee for six months, offers a number of ways that the owners of vacant storefronts could get a break on the fee, including proving that they're actively marketing their space.

Fire officials say that although they regularly check such items as fire alarms and sprinkler systems in store and office buildings, they lack a systematic fire-code inspection, responding only to complaints. They argue that more inspections could improve safety. Moreover, getting access to buildings would allow fire inspectors to spot violations of other city codes such as zoning or health rules, Fire Chief Alex Jackson said.

But business representatives find plenty of objections to the plan.

Business representatives prefer St. Paul's system of charging for actual inspections, not annually, but Minneapolis officials said their ordinances prohibit that.

Another wrinkle to the program is that some businesses would get inspected far more often than others. Assistant Fire Marshall Gordon Bates told business representatives recently that some fire stations have few businesses in their territories, meaning more frequent checks, while other stations are overloaded with businesses, meaning inspectors would visit less often.

Dogging the inspection proposal is the suspicion that it is intended to keep firefighters on the payroll in the face of looming budget cuts, a charge that's denied by Council Member Paul Ostrow, the proposal's sponsor. That view is fueled in part by the shift of apartment rental license inspections from regulatory inspectors to fire captains in 2003, when the city faced similar state aid cuts.

A short-lived proposal last fall would have shifted those duties back to the inspections department, along with $800,000 it was paying to the fire department to do the work. But that proposal was withdrawn as budget conditions worsened. Ostrow argued that since fire captains already are on the city payroll and have some down time between fire runs and maintenance, it's more efficient for them to do fire inspections and the new building checks. Mayor R.T. Rybak is counting on the fire-inspection fees to help balance his 2009 budget.

But some council members are unhappy with the lack of money generated by fire inspectors in citing apartment owners who fail to make ordered improvements, especially compared with the amount collected by non-fire rental inspectors.

"I don't think it's a good time to be adding this fee to small and struggling businesses," said Council Member Cam Gordon.

Fire officials have readied alternate fee plans that could slice the annual charges on buildings of 5,000 square feet or less to as low as $50. But downtown-area Council Member Lisa Goodman is fighting adding fees to the biggest buildings, saying they're professionally run and likely to have fewer violations.