Here’s the latest from the department of government inefficiency: The Van Ness Tesla showroom that’s been the site of Elon Musk protests also lacks its permit approvals, though it seems the Department of Building Inspection just dropped the ball.
We’ve been reporting a lot lately on the recurring, weekly protests at the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue, all held in response to Elon Musk’s dismantling the US government to serve his and Trump’s billionaire special interests. That showroom is in the news again, on a non-protest day even, for completely unrelated reasons. The Chronicle has a very surprising new report today that the Tesla showroom at Van Ness and O’Farrell Street is operating without its proper building permits, and, in fact, has been for the entire nine years since it opened as a Tesla showroom in 2016.
The initial temptation is to compare this to Musk’s unauthorized sleeping quarters in the former Twitter/X building, where Musk and the SF Department of Building Inspection (DBI) butted heads over unpermitted bedrooms in an office building. But these do not appear to be similar cases. In this situation, it seems like the Tesla showroom applied for all the necessary conversion permits, and DBI just never got around to completing the inspections.
The location has long been an automobile showroom, previously for Bentley. Tesla embarked on a $2.3 renovation when they took it over in late 2015, for its 2016 opening. And most of the unpermitted changes do not affect areas that customers would visit.
But unpermitted still means unpermitted, and there could be safety issues lurking. “You don’t really have legal permission to use those premises, without a final permit,” said Lee Ann Slinkard, a software executive who’d worked with DBI on previous system upgrades (that they failed to adopt).
Indeed, a look at the address’s building permit history shows an unusually high number of incomplete and expired permit applications. The first one that displays is a June 2016 application to install a new automotive lift, listed as “FILED - 6/16/2016,” but whose approval was never granted. And there are six “Expired” permits listed that oddly just expired yesterday, March 11.
As a nerd who looks at such listings frequently, I can tell you that normally most properties’ permit applications are generally marked in this database as “Complete” or “Issued.” But of this building’s 22 permit applications dating back to 2005, only seven are marked as issued, the other two-thirds are either listed as “Expired” or “Filed,” with filing dates from years ago.
DBI spokesperson Patrick Hannan described the incomplete permit inspections as an “oversight.”
District 7 Supervisor Myrna Megar, who’s served on both the Planning Commission and the Building Inspection Commission, says this is a chronic, ongoing problem.
“A lot of things go missing, get altered, or fall off the radar because no one is tracking them,” she told the Chronicle. “The system they have built is not modern, it’s a system built on paper. What I’ve heard for decades is, ‘These are construction people, not very sophisticated, and can’t be expected to use computers.’”
The city’s permit system is 20 years old, and does not flag expired or incomplete permits. Previous Chronicle reporting describes an early 2010s-era effort on a $7.7 million upgrade to the system, where that money was spent, but the system never got upgraded. (And you thought a $1.7 million toilet was a waste of money!) The DBI spokesperson Hannan tells the Chronicle the department is “actively planning and scoping a replacement system.”
So this all appears that the Tesla showroom is not properly permitted because it fell through the cracks of the DBI’s permitting system, with no actual malfeasance involved. Or was there?
The timeframe in which the initial 2016 permits were allowed to go into limbo was under the jurisdiction of former DBI director Tom Hui, who was never charged with a crime, but certainly gave free reign to permit expediter and Mohammed Nuru bribe-arranger Walter Wong, and notorious bribes-for-permits ex-DBI Inspector Bernie Curran. So these lapses happened at a time when bribes were flowing freely at the DBI.
So maybe the permit inspections fell through the cracks. But a consipracy theorist could say they were conveniently dropped where cracks happen to be located.
Related: Scenes From Saturday's Protest at SF's Tesla Showroom [SFist]
Image: Steve D via Yelp
