Two months after surprise inspections at 13 properties, the Santa Barbara City Attorney’s office has accused Santa Barbara landlord Dario Pini of more than 3,000 violations of a bevy of health and safety codes.
The unfair competition action, filed Thursday in Santa Barbara Superior Court in conjunction with the District Attorney’s Office, argued that each of the 3,245 code violations constitutes an unfair business practice.
The two offices are seeking over $8.1 million in penalties and for a third party to assume control of Pini’s properties to remediate the alleged violations.
The landlord’s “thousands of unlawful acts and neglect” go back to the early 1980s, the complaint alleges. Many of Pini’s tenants are low-income immigrant families.
“Pini has a business practice of seeking out and taking advantage of tenants who may be unable to demand their legal rights to safe and habitable housing because of their poverty, immigration status, age or disabilities,” the complaint read.
“He routinely threatens retaliation and actually retaliates against tenants who do have the courage to complain, thereby suppressing evidence of his unlawful actions and neglect.”
The complaint said Pini’s residents “are exposed to hazardous, horrific and unconscionable living conditions.”
Inspections of 164 units, including Pini’s own residence, turned up what Santa Barbara City Attorney Ariel Calonne’s office called “severely substandard living conditions” in many units including rodent and cockroach infestations, hazardous electrical equipment, sanitary issues, structural hazards, overcrowding and inoperable heaters.
“In my 33 years, I have never seen a single property owner or landlord with the breadth of violations that we discovered during our inspections in December,” said Calonne, who has spearheaded the city’s crackdown in recent years.
At the time of the December inspections, people staying at the Ala Mar Motel at 102 W. Cabrillo Blvd. were told by the city to immediately find other accommodations after inspectors closed down the property for “extreme safety risks resulting from hazardous modifications to a gas-fired boiler system located in an electrical equipment room containing significant electrical violations.”
Pini told Noozhawk at the time that the issue was a half-inch gas line connected to a water heater that was supposed to be three-quarters of an inch — a problem, he said, that was corrected within an hour.
Pini’s run-ins with city enforcement are frequent. Last year, he pleaded no contest to violating a worker safety regulation and was sentenced to three years of probation.
He has also been fined by the city for code violations and the lack of progress on mandated projects to repair and upgrade his properties.
In a December interview, Pini called the city’s actions “slanderous misappropriations of taxpayers’ money.”
Some of the inspections’ findings, like rats and an unfinished bathroom, were from his own personal residence, he said.
He told Noozhawk his real estate and management company, which oversees hundreds of local properties, sprays for pests quarterly, performs quarterly checks on smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and employs gardeners as well as painting and maintenance crews.
He said he responds to tenants’ complaints, the most common of which relate to cleanliness.
In response to reports of overcrowding at his properties, he told Noozhawk at the time of the inspections that overcrowding results from tenants’ family members moving in without notice. He also claimed he is providing workforce housing where other landlords won’t.
Pini said many Santa Barbara City College students pack into houses without consequences, and questioned whether the city’s actions thus stemmed in part from racial motivations.
Calonne said Pini’s alleged violations put law-abiding landlords at a competitive disadvantage.
“If Volkswagen doesn’t follow the pollution standards and it has faster, more powerful vehicles as a result, that puts all the good guys at a competitive disadvantage,” Calonne said.
The use of the unfair competition law in Santa Barbara, he noted, was unprecedented, and only made possible through the cooperation of the District Attorney’s office.
“I believe (District Attorney Joyce Dudley) gave me the authority she gave me because she recognized how severe these problems are,” he said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
