AUGUSTA — The city on Thursday shut down a three-unit Eastern Avenue apartment building where the tenants said they’d been living since early February with no water and only partial heat in the building.
A neighbor said the tenants filled up buckets of snow and brought them inside to melt it for water so they could flush their toilets, according to Robert Overton, code enforcement officer.
The city ordered the tenants — four adults — to leave the building around 9 a.m. Thursday, and it put them up in an Augusta hotel and plans to help them find more-permanent housing.
As of Thursday afternoon, Overton said he had been unable to reach the building owner, Stephen Gass, who has a Florida address on city assessing records.
No one answered calls to a Pompano Beach, Florida, number listed for Gass. A message said the mailbox was full.
The property, which totals 122 acres, is assessed by the city for tax purposes at $176,400. Records indicate the two-story building was built in 1900. Gass owns about a dozen other properties in the city, according to assessing records.
Overton said that according to tenants, sometime around the beginning of winter, more than half of the building lost its heating system. Then in January, the pipes in the basement froze, forcing water to be shut off to the building.
“So we’ve had people living in the building since November without heat and since sometime in early February without water,” Overton said. “It’s alarming they lived in the apartments as long as they did in these conditions.”
One apartment of the blue-shingled building at 709 Eastern Ave. was occupied by one adult, Marshall Leavitt.
Another apartment was occupied by three adults: Candida Bell and her adult children, Ashley Bell and Steven Bell, according to Overton. The other unit was vacant.
Leavitt’s apartment still had heat, but the Bells’ apartment had no working heating system, Overton said. The tenants did have electric space heaters they provided themselves.
Overton said tenants said it was getting hard to pay their electric bill, which was elevated because of the cost of running the space heaters.
Tenants told Overton their landlord had offered them a $100 reduction in rent in exchange for not having heat or water, and he told them he’d get the heat and water functioning again when he returned to Maine, in about a month.
Overton said the city was made aware of the problems at the building by a caseworker of one of the tenants, who had visited it. Overton said the city offered all the tenants hotel rooms if they agreed to vacate the property. They agreed to leave, but hesitantly, as they were concerned about finding permanent housing after having to leave the building.
Calls to a phone number on a sign on one of the apartment’s doors were not answered Thursday.
The tenants didn’t have to remove their belongings from the building, just agree not to stay there.
Overton said he will post the building as unfit for occupancy. He said a number of improvements will need to be made to the building for it to be reoccupied.
Keith Edwards — 621-5647
Twitter: @kedwardskj
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