Frustrated merchants find red tape daunting

Businesses pestered into fleeing Detroit

Photos by David Coates / The Detroit News Joe Arcand, left, and Tina Tabbi, co-owners of Golden Spice Catering, moved their operations into Detroit in 1997. Since then they’ve battled city inspectors demanding a range of fees and changes to their business.

Arcand and Tabbi tried to get city police to run off prostitutes from in front of their catering business on Eight Mile Road but the police never showed up.

By Cameron McWhirter / The Detroit News

    DETROIT— Prolonged frustration with city services has stark consequences: Small business owners find it hard to do business and find it hard to stay.

    For many businesses, annual inspections and licensing are a periodic nightmare.

    “Nobody knows what this guy’s doing or that guy’s doing or that guy is doing; it’s all a mess,” said Tina Tabbi. Along with her business partner Joe Arcand, she moved cooking operations of their Golden Spice Catering Co. into Detroit in 1997. Since then, they have had numerous headaches with bureaucrats — and a stack of documents to prove it.

    Tabbi and Arcand aren’t unusual in having problems with city bureaucracy. They are unusual in that they moved into the city. More often, businesses move out. A 1997 survey of businesses by the U.S. Census Bureau, the most recently completed, showed the number of businesses dropped more than 4 percent since 1992, following a decades-long decline.

    Orlando Nalli, 61, who ran Orlando Clothiers in downtown’s Buhl building for the past decade, moved his business to St. Clair Shores this month. He said downtown business groups pleaded with the city to make shoppers welcome downtown, but to no avail.

    The most contact he had with city government was his periodic — and futile — attempts to get the city to stop giving so many parking tickets to downtown shoppers and plead for cheaper and plentiful parking.

    “Businesses never got any support from the city,” he said. “It never got any better. So I said enough.”

    Tabbi and Arcand haven’t given up yet, but their move into the big city has been an exercise in frustration.

    The caterers were enthralled by Mayor Dennis Archer’s rhetoric about a new Detroit. But they have come to know the bureaucratic reality.

    The two were looking for a permanent kitchen when they catered a party in 1995 where Archer was the guest speaker. The mayor spoke passionately about the need for businesses to invest and relocate in Detroit.

    It was a new day, Archer told the crowd. Tabbi took the clarion call to heart, and with Arcand purchased a long-shuttered bar on Eight Mile Road, rehabbed it, and turned it into a kitchen and storage space for their growing catering business.

    Everything seemed fine — at first. Then they called police to help them run off prostitutes. Detroit police never showed, so finally they set up a sting with Wayne County Sheriff’s deputies. Arcand to this day has to collect used drug needles still occasionally left by prostitutes on their front sidewalk.

    Then city inspectors arrived. Fire inspectors, plumbing inspectors, building inspectors, kitchen inspectors. They demanded a range of fees — electrical, refrigeration and plumbing.

    One inspector kept shaking his head at each appliance. When they tried to offer a solution, the man would only stare deeply into their eyes and say slowly, “That’s not going to feed the bulldog.”

    Fees came fast and furious to the small business, overwhelming them with work. One of the most annoying was a bill for $47 in 1998 to repair a fire hydrant — clear across the city on the lower west side on 18th Street. The hydrant has nothing to do with Golden Spice.

    After calls to department after department finally got them to the right city worker, they explained the hydrant couldn’t possibly be their responsibility.

    Nevermind, they were told, just don’t pay it. Tabbi wonders why the city wasted their time.

    Next came a $1,100 water bill and a $400 signage bill from 1984 to the present. But they didn’t buy the building until 1997. After battling with city bureaucrats, Arcand finally got them to reduce the charges dramatically — to cover only the years that they owned the building.

    Then city officials argued that their new furnace did not meet city specifications, and they would be fined. Of course the furnace does not meet specifications, Arcand and Tabbi had to argue repeatedly, because it’s a new furnace and the city code has not incorporated the manufacturers’ new changes. The only way to satisfy city code at the time would have been to buy an old furnace. Eventually, the city backed off.

    Today the business partners have a stack of papers as thick as a telephone book documenting battles with city departments. They’ve thought about leaving but have invested too much in their building to pack up now.

    “All this time that I’m doing this, I should be talking to clients,” said Tabbi, who still has a photograph of her and Archer on her wall from that meeting in 1995. “It just seems so unnecessary. They have some very helpful people working in the City of Detroit. But they’ve got a lot of people who don’t belong there.”

You can reach Cameron McWhirter at (313) 222-2072 or cmcwhirter@detnews.com .