Although the project only was approved for four floors, construction began on a fifth floor, raising concerns about whether the $7.9 million development project was being completed in the proper manner. A collapse stemming from a pile of drywall on the fourth floor led to safety questions, and a stop-work order for the fifth floor was issued on June 26.

City Manager George Lahanas said he hopes the council looks at whether the fifth floor would have been approved if it had been submitted properly before looking at ramifications for the developer.

“Issues of enforcement and ‘Did they violate the building code and permit?’ are separate,” Lahanas said. “The city may issue a citation for that, but it’s a separate issue. Because if you start commingling that during a meeting, you begin to think about it a little differently and you don’t know whether or not you should approve it.”

Councilmember Nathan Triplett agreed that the construction itself required separate attention from the issue of code enforcement and said the fifth floor likely would not have been an issue were it included in the initial planning process.

“The proposed fifth floor is not an issue for me — it’s the way it came about,” Triplett said.

Triplett added the issue had an unseen benefit in requiring the city to look at its own interdepartmental communication practices and improve them for future projects.

“It uncovered a lot of things,” Councilmember Don Power said. “We have many, many checkpoints along the way that should prevent these things from happening, and every one of these checkpoints failed. There was a problem with the breakdown with the staff, and as a result of that, things got by.”

Changes surrounding the departments already have begun, as East Lansing Code Enforcement and Neighborhood Conservation Director Howard Asch — who was overseeing the project — resigned from the city on June 29.

In addition to the St. Anne Lofts, the council also will vote whether to approve a concessionaire license, which could bring food trucks to the downtown area.

“Some of our downtown businesses have had some concerns about it, and we’re trying to strike a balance of allowing food trucks into our downtown, but in a way that doesn’t unduly harm our established downtown restaurants,” Lahanas said.