City orders demolition of Red Carpet Inn

A troubled Greenwood hotel will likely be demolished, a city commission affirmed Monday night.

In a unanimous vote, the Greenwood Advisory Plan Commission affirmed a city order to demolish the Red Carpet Inn and Fanta Suites at 1117 E. Main St. in Greenwood. The order came from by the city’s Building Commissioner Kenneth Seal. The decision came after a nearly two-and-a-half hour hearing on the matter that saw testimony from city and county inspectors and the hotel’s owner, Ahmed Mubarak.

Kenneth Seal, the city’s building commissioner, had issued the demolition order in March, and citing sections of the Indiana code for unsafe buildings, said that the property was unsafe. He said the hotel’s general condition warrants removal or continued re-inspection and additional actions would be needed to correct the nuisance issues. The plan commission had also already found the building to be an unsafe structure during a hearing in November, said Bill Barrett, an attorney representing both Seal and the city on the matter.

Tony Paganelli, an attorney representing the hotel, declined to comment on the commission’s decision, citing ongoing litigation. The hotel is considering its appeal options though, he said.

Concerns about the hotel have been mounting ever since a June 2021 inspection led to a notice of abatement being issued, and Mubarak being ordered to fix the violations. A building permit was issued in November 2021 for this work, and the hotel was given several months to fix the issues and bring the place up to code, Barrett said.

By September 2022, more complaints were filed against the hotel, leading to another inspection. A notice of noncompliance and an order to vacate was eventually issued on Sept. 30, ordering everyone, including employees, off the property. The hotel appealed this order, and a plan commission hearing was set for October on the matter. In October, officials announced an agreement was reachedthat said the hotel would be vacated in 48 hours.

However, the hotel did not comply, city officials said. The city filed for an injunction to enforce the order, and in December, a judge said the hotel must be vacated. During this time, the plan commission also affirmed the notice of vacation and abatement.

Prior to this, another inspection took place on Nov. 28, which the hotel failed. Seal, along with other inspectors, recounted what they saw during this inspection during Monday’s plan commission hearing.

In November, workers appeared to be actively working to fix the hotel’s issues, though it was a work in progress, Seal said. Officials then worked to schedule another inspection, which took place on Jan. 5.

During the Jan. 5 inspection, officials found that despite some “very minor” corrections in Building A — the hotel is divided into multiple buildings — many of the previous issues found and listed in the initial abatement order were still present, Seal said.

Building B had substantial flood damage from multiple pipes bursting. The ceiling had collapsed, leaving wiring and electrical items hanging down. There were also rooms littered with debris and broke furniture, and no dumpsters on site for the debris collection.

Inspectors also found violations involving GFCI, or ground fault circuit interceptor, outlets in several bathrooms and guest rooms. GFCI outlets are designed to protect inhabitants from ground faults by tripping and causing power to stop flowing through the outlet, Seal said.

Additionally, Seal said officials found broken outlets throughout the hotel and outlets with no cover plates. There were a couple of areas that did not have any outlets installed, just exposed wiring.

Ryan Angrick, a deputy fire marshal for the Greenwood Fire Department, testified that there were multiple areas of the hotel using extension cords as permanent source of power — something that is not allowed by fire code because the cords are an easy way to start fires. Several smoke detectors were damaged or not present in rooms as well, he said.

There was also combustible storage present in several of the electrical rooms, another violation, Angrick said.

During the most recent inspections in November and January, Johnson County Health Department Director Betsy Swearingen said she continued to see repetitive issues such as leaks and rodents inside the hotel.

Swearingen, along with Seal and Angrick, all said they believed the buildings endangered public health and safety. Officials also looked at the number of police and fire calls to the hotel. There were 250 police calls and 37 fire runs to the hotel from June 2021 to January 2023, Seal testified.

The number of fire runs was high for a hotel, Angerick said. While there will be typical calls like a sick person or an allergic reaction, having calls for seven overdoses, along with calls for multiple cardiac arrests and chest pains associated with illegal drug usage is putting firefighters and EMS personnel in danger, he said.

None of the officials testified that the building was in danger of structural collapse, something that Paganelli, Mubarak’s attorney, later pointed out. While the hotel was in rough shape, the evidence presented by the city was about fixable things, Paganelli told the commission.

“This thing certainly needs to be cleaned from top to bottom, and it may not be fixable by the current owner,” Paganelli said. “It may be that the best solution for this hotel is to be sold to a new owner who has the resources and the wherewithal to fix these problems.”

However, Seal said that a structural problem is just one of the options listed under the unsafe building law for tearing down buildings. The hotel still meets other parts of the law, Barrett later said.

Pagnelli also accused the city of doing an end-run around the judicial process, as the city and the hotel are currently involved in a lawsuit. The lawsuit should’ve been allowed to run its course, he told the commission.

Once the buildings are destroyed, nothing can be undone. The hotel cannot currently have occupants, so it poses no danger to the public right now, Pangelli said.

“If the building is destroyed, it’s destroyed and it cannot be undestroyed,” he said.

During his testimony, Mubarak quoted the Bible, calling it “the most important code” that officials failed to mention. He told the commission that he’s tried to do good things for Greenwood. The hotel had taken in families who had nowhere else to go, he said.

He also alleged that those who complained about the hotel in both 2021 and 2022 were former employees who were caught stealing from the hotel and were doing drugs. He had scraped together his savings to buy the hotel, which is supposed to support his family, he said.

“I have been getting bankrupt and getting dragged through the mud for the last six months for no good reason,” Mubarak said.

Mubarak went on to criticize the inspection process, saying the inspectors were there to intimidate the public. An IRCA Certified Auditor, Mubarak said he goes out of his way to help those he inspects. He later asked the commission for more time to make the repairs.

Commission member Brian Walker said his biggest question was about what Mubarak was doing to fix the problems. Normally, someone would come up with a construction plan and have a contractor to help fix the issues, he said.

“There’s been no movement,” Walker said. “So to not fulfill the commitments of the building commission, I feel like we’re just putting people in harm’s way.”

While Mubarak’s attorney argued it wasn’t a danger to the public because it wasn’t open to them, commission members Josh King and David Lekse disagreed. If there were to be a fire in the building, first responders would be putting themselves in danger to deal with it, King said.

This danger would also extend to workers making repairs, Lekse said.

“If these construction efforts are ongoing on an ad hoc basis, we could have drywallers in there who can’t can’t pull a fire alarm when they see the fire, so it can be a danger to construction workers,” he said.

The commission ultimately voted 9-0 to affirm the demolition order. The hotel now has less than 15 days to have a “substantial beginning” toward the demolition of all buildings located on the property, officials said.