Woman loses boat slip and 'life's dream'

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

On the 15th day of each month, Marci Berman used to take the bus to Santa Barbara City Hall and pay $187 cash for her coveted boat slip at the harbor.
It wasn’t easy for Berman to come up with the money, but it was a monthly ritual that the 75-year-old, silver haired woman faithfully maintained for the past 10 years despite having a monthly income of roughly $700 -- $400 of which comes from a Social Security check and the other $300 from playing piano at local senior living facilities.


It was her dream, she said, to one day have enough money to retire and enjoy her boat.
But her dream came crashing down on Nov. 15 when the city’s Harbor Commission voted 3-2 to deny a “hardship appeal” filed by Berman, and strip her of the slip.
“I feel like they stole my Christmas and my New Years,” Berman told the Daily Sound in a phone interview. “I’m fed up with the harbor.”

THE TIMELINE
The Nov. 15 Harbor Commission meeting was the exclamation point on a rough couple of months for Berman.
She said she failed to make her July slip payment after taking a “once in a lifetime” vacation to Florida at the end of June where she was supposed to play a couple of piano gigs with a friend, but the gigs fell through. As a result, Berman said she returned to Santa Barbara in mid July with little money to pay her bills.
Longstanding policy at the harbor is to terminate a person’s slip when they fail to make the payment current within 60 days, according to John Bridley, Santa Barbara’s Waterfront Director.
Berman said she was well aware of this policy and delivered her cash payment of $187 about 30-days late on Aug. 14. She said she was under the impression that this payment would erase July’s debt. Then on Sept. 15, Berman made a double payment of about $374 for August and September, which she thought would bring her current on her slip fees.
But the clock didn’t stop after her August payment was made and on Sept. 7, her slip was officially terminated.
“You can say ‘what I paid in August was for July,’” Bridley said during the Harbor Commission meeting. “That doesn’t start a new 60-day timeframe though.
“If we did that, trust me, we’d have a lot of folks that would be 30 days in the rears.”
Though the city initially accepted her payment on Sept. 15, Berman was later refunded and notified that her slip had been terminated and her boat was accruing guest fees, which could be as much as $100 per day.
In the midst of these payments Bridley said the harbor attempted to reach Berman several times, both by mail, certified mail and an emergency phone number, but received no response other than the partial August payment.
Berman did not deny receiving these notices and exercised her right to appeal the Waterfront Department’s decision to terminate her slip before the Harbor Commission.

THE APPEAL
Scott Riedman, business manager for the Waterfront Department, presented a brief synopsis of the timeline to the five-person commission and noted the numerous attempts the department made to reach Berman before terminating the slip.
Riedman said a slip termination is an “uncomfortable situation” that has occurred only seven times in the past seven years.
“This particular situation is a very unfortunate situation that would likely not have occurred had the department had any means of contacting the slip permittee by telephone or mail,” Riedman said.
Standing no taller than 5-foot, 2-inches, Berman stood before the commission in the City Council chambers and told her story.
“The slip is really important to me because I’m 75,” she said. “I’m still working but I had planned to retire someday. It might be in 10 years. I don’t know and when I retire, I had planned to enjoy my boat.”
Berman, who doesn’t have an answering machine at her home, said she was sorry harbor officials weren’t able to reach her and told the commission she hoped they would reconsider the Waterfront Department’s decision to terminate the slip.
“I never thought I was 60 days late,” Berman told the commission. “I didn’t realize the slip was going to be confiscated to be honest with you.”
Douglas Gillies, a local attorney representing Berman, spelled out the woman’s financial situation to the commission and noted that when the city accepted her double payment in September, it did just that and as such, it shouldn’t have been refunded.
“She did what she thought was the best thing to do,” Gillies said. “She paid the July payment on Aug. 15.
“That payment in September was accepted by the city and as a lawyer when I look at something that says ‘payment accepted in error,’ then all of these bells go off in my head because acceptance means one thing in the law. It means ‘we accept your payment’ and that can erase earlier problems.”
Bridley disagreed and said the payment was briefly accepted only because Berman made it at City Hall and not at the harbor.
“Now you can call that an error,” he said. “We did in a gracious way to say that the slip had already been terminated but the way she makes payments, unfortunately in cash at City Hall, doesn’t allow us to catch when it should not have been collected.”
Gillies said he believed another error occurred when Berman received a letter from a company called Marine Lien Sales in October, which said she would have to pay more than $2,000 to get her boat back.
Gillies questioned how such a high amount of money could have accumulated so quickly, to which Bridley explained the guest slips, which cost as much as $100 per day. As of last week, Gillies said Berman would have to pay more than $9,000 just to get her boat back.
There were “lots of errors, but the bottom line is she needs that slip, it’s her dream,” Gillies told the commissioners.

THE COMMISSION’S RESPONSE
Commissioner Ken Owen told Berman he appreciated her situation, but said in the past when the waterfront had a more relaxed policy about slip fees; people often fell behind on the payments.
“This is the first time I met you and I really like you,” Owen told Berman. “I have a lot of compassion … But I don’t know how we as landlords can do that any differently.”
Owen argued that if the commission made an exception for Berman, it would open the door for other slip permittees to be late on their payments.
Frank Kelly, the chairman of the commission, said technically Berman ran afoul of the rules and he wished it hadn’t happened, but the commission needed to decide, “If it’s in everybody’s best interest to grant the hardship appeal.”
Commissioner William Anikouchine let his fellow commissioners know exactly where he stood.
“Somebody has to play the scrooge here I guess,” Anikouchine said. “The harbor is an enterprise. Its [ability] to serve the community depends on it being run as a business. It’s not a welfare organization.”
Anikouchine went on to say, “The term hardship rings very dull in my ear sitting in paradise. If that’s the case, there’s a whole nation of hardship cases out there that don’t live here.”
Owen said if the commission gave Berman her slip back, he didn’t believe she would default again, but said that did not change his opinion on how to vote.
“It’s nothing personal, but as landlords we don’t have any other choice,” he said.
Commissioner Elizabeth Cramer disagreed and said that as landlords, they had the power to make an exception for Berman.
“I believe landlords have the right to grant exceptions and a hardship is a legal concept applied in this case and I would be very supportive in granting the hardship exception,” Cramer said before making a motion to grant Berman’s appeal.
Commissioner Charles E. Watson said he couldn’t get past the fact that Berman had been receiving her mail and therefore, he said, should have known about the slip termination.
After seconding Cramer’s motion to approve the appeal, Kelly made one final statement.
“What makes us humans is very interesting,” he said. “We have the opportunity to not be a computer or just a mindless machine, but we have an opportunity to let compassion pop into the issue and that’s really what this is and you either go for it or you don’t.”
With that, the commission voted 3-2 to deny the motion to approve the appeal. Owen then made a motion to deny the appeal, which passé. 3-2, with Kelly and Cramer voted in favor of granting the appeal.


FINAL DECSION
Bridley said the commission’s decision is final and unappealable.
Santa Barbara Mayor Mary Blum said there was enough buzz around City Hall about Berman’s terminated slip that she watched a DVD of the commission’s hearing before requesting a synopses from Bridley, which was sent to Blum and the rest of the City Council members.
In his letter, Bridley says, “There are numerous unfortunate circumstances surrounding the termination of the slip. However, I believe the Department acted appropriately and followed the requirements outlined in slip termination process per the Municipal Code …”
In the letter, Bridley notes that he allowed Gillies to file an appeal on behalf of Berman after a 10-day deadline to do so had expired.
Blum said she also believed it was an unfortunate situation, but there was nothing the council could do.
“It’s sad that she would have to lose her slip, but there were a lot of accommodations that were made,” Blum said. “These are very difficult matters. I know she’s had that slip for a long time, I just didn’t see anything that we could do.”
Since the Harbor Commission’s decision is not appealable, Gillies said Berman’s only option at this point is to file a lawsuit against the city.
Berman said she does not know if she has the means to file a lawsuit.
As for the slip itself, Bridley said Berman’s 1968 sailboat remains there, but will eventually be moved and sold. The slip, he said, will be turned over to a whoever is at the top of a 75-person waiting list, which stopped taking new names in 1998.
Due to the scarcity of slips – there are about 1,133 in the harbor and they rarely are vacant – Berman said she believes the Waterfront Department stands to make serious money on her slip.
But Bridley said the slip wouldn’t be sold. He said the person who takes it over will simply resume the payments Berman was making.
He also said Berman would not be held to pay the more than $9,000 that has been accumulating for the storage of her vessel, but the eventual sale of her boat will go help the department recoup the costs of storage.
“This is a last resort type of situation whenever we take slips,” Bridley said. “It’s a very unfortunate set of circumstance that led to the termination.”
But all of this is little comfort to Berman, who said she valiantly paid the slip fee each month for more than a decade with the hope of one day retiring and spending some time on the water.
“It’s very, very upsetting to me to be going through this,” she said. “I want to keep the slip. I want to retire.
“I wish that they’d cut me a little slack.”