GOP headquarters abandoned, left in 'mind-boggling' disarray, landlord says

Jan 26, 2011
Whine and chocolates
GOP headquarters abandoned, left in 'mind-boggling' disarray, landlord says
By John R. Lamb
City Beat

“No one wants to quit when he’s losing and no one wants to quit when he’s winning.” —Richard Strauss

These are shaky times for our beloved friends over at San Diego Republican headquarters, wherever that might be now...

“You wouldn’t believe what they ditched in the trash bin!” said Antoine Georges, who’s owned the building for 20 years. “Thousands of things. Office supplies, staplers— maybe 30 or 40 staplers, the big kind for campaign work—pots and pans, boxes and boxes of stuff, even brand-new live plants! It was just mind-boggling.”

A lively 62-year-old Lebanese man who considers himself fiscally conservative but socially liberal (he says he’s friends with Republican Congressmember Darrell Issa and a cousin of Ralph Nader), Georges told Spin Cycle that he had grown suspicious of his tenants in Suite 107 for some time.

He’d heard rumors that the tenant had wanted to break the lease. Georges said the head honcho of the local GOP, Tony Krvaric, had asked him on several occasions if he’d consider donating the rent as a party gift. Georges said he declined.

Rent checks of roughly $4,500, he said, started coming later and later in the month. The December lease payment, for example, while due Dec. 1, arrived more than three weeks late on Christmas Eve.
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Related to:San Diego Republican headquartersRepublican Party of San Diego CountyTony Krvaric

But the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, activity in the suite seemed to pick up, despite it being a typically down time for campaign events. Over previous weeks, Georges said the local GOP “made up some story” that they were going to remodel the 2,700-square-foot office space. Soon, trucks would show up to haul away office materials, Georges said.

Georges said a truck associated with a paper-shredding company appeared one day and hauled off what he described as “20 or 30 boxes of files.” Added Georges: “I have no idea what was in the boxes. I just know there were a lot of them.”

The final move came just before New Year’s Day, when a GOP employee removed a Republican sign that had been bolted to a wall, placed it in a truck and drove off.

A few days later, Georges said he got a letter from Krvaric, claiming the landlord had breached the lease and that the GOP would like its security deposit back.

Georges laughed. “The place is trashed!” he said. “It needs new carpet. The walls need to be repaired because they literally glued campaign signs to the wallpaper. And they still left a bunch of stuff behind! Empty file cabinets, furniture. And they never returned the keys, so now I have to have all the locks changed.”...