Suppose your firm has several contracts with commercial properties, including strip malls and multi-tenant office buildings, to perform their electrical maintenance and to respond when they have problems. Occasionally, the owner of a given property has your firm do a lighting upgrade or other project, as well. Because commercial properties are overbuilt in this area, keeping tenants happy is important to the property owners. More than one has changed property managers due to some grievance or another from a tenant. Your crews know to be polite and professional, and to go the extra mile to accommodate tenants when performing work.

One tenant is proving to be a headache, however. The first call there was because of a power loss. The problem turned out to be several 20A breakers that had tripped due to overload. The tenant had surge strips plugged into surge strips. There were personal appliances everywhere, things ranging from coffee pots to space heaters. Your electricians managed to sort out the “DIY load distribution” and discussed with the tenant the nature of the problem.

The tenant did nothing about the individual load problem, allowing their employees to bring just about anything to their desk and plug it in. The problem came back, and again your people sorted out the extension cords and surge strips. This time, your crew was instructed to scope out the property for a branch circuit addition proposal. While doing that, your crew removed the many paper file boxes the tenant had stacked in front of the distribution panel and placed a minimum clearance sign there

Your company's account manager for that property submitted photos and a proposal to the property owner for adding four branch circuits to that tenant's space. The projects was approved. While setting up for the job, the crew again encountered those paper boxes in front of the panel. The minimum clearance sign was replaced with one that said “DO NOT MOVE THESE BOXES.”

You could move those boxes, do the work, and move the boxes back since the tenant would move them back anyhow. But this creates four problems:

1.   It leaves combustibles near a panel.

2.    Your actions give tacit approval to a Code violation, and that could be a liability issue.

3.    You would be going along with providing a reason for people to be near a panel they would otherwise not go near.

4.    The likelihood that people could die is significantly increased.

This situation and the repeated problems with the daisy-chaining of surge strips clearly show the tenant disregards some basic electrical safety practices. If you say nothing at this point, you will avoid irritating the tenant. But if you say nothing at this point and the tenants actions result in a fire, the fact you said nothing despite having “superior knowledge” upon which the tenant made “detrimental reliance” puts your firm on the hook in a liability suit.

Even if you say something to this tenant, they've already demonstrated they don't care what you think. So to whom do you complain, and how?

You have to make it clear to the property owner that this particular tenant is a danger to other tenants. Explain how and why this tenant's behavior creates a considerable risk of fire, which would likely cause significant property damage and the loss of all the rents for that building. And that's not even accounting for the risk of severe injury or death.

Framing the problem this way, you're not putting the property owner in the position of trying to please one tenant and thus overlooking that tenant's behavior. You are putting the property owner in the position of needing to protect the other tenants from this one.

If the property owner decides to roll the dice just to keep this one tenant, that would put your firm in a similar position. Do you risk your reputation and future liability to keep this one client, or do you tell the property owner you need to protect your firm from the undue risk involved here? If the latter, be careful not to burn any bridges.