UTICA, N.Y. (WKTV) - "Check with the Fire Department."

The Corporation Counsel for the City of Utica says we need to talk with the heads of Utica's Fire Department to see why the case against Timothy Klotz never made it back in court.

"The Fire Department will have to speak on why that didn't get back into court," said Corporation Counsel Linda Sullivan-Fatata on Friday, after repeated attempts to talk with the City's Corporation Counsel all week to try to get an answer to that very question.

The City of Utica cited the owner of the building - Timothy Klotz - for not registering the apartment building on James Street back in 2008.

Klotz was fined $100 and ordered by a city court judge to register the building within 10 days, so that the city could inspect the building. Klotz never registered, so the city could not go into the building and inspect it. The question remains, what did the city do to follow up on the judge's ruling?

City Court Judge John Balzano said earlier in the week that once sentencing was over in this case, it was out of the court's hands. The judge said if something was returned to the court by the city that Klotz didn't comply, the court could have issued an arrest warrant for him.

NEWSChannel 2 has been trying to get an answer to what was done, or wasn't done on the city's part to get Klotz' case back into court, after Klotz did not comply with the judge's order to register within 10 days.

On Friday, still no word yet back from Utica Fire Department officials after being pointed in their direction by the city.

However, at a press conference on Monday, the day after the fire, we asked Fire Marshal Raymond Beck: "Part of the plea that Klotz agreed to a year ago, was that he register within 10 days, and is there a procedure by the city to make sure he does, eventually?"

Beck responded, "When he was cited, we were still on the manual system, if you go through news archives, you'll see that, to bring us to the 21st century, we were computer augmented now, that was something that was done through the codes department and ourselves."

A followup question to Beck by WKTV NEWSChannel 2 was "So, do you think that if he was forced to register eventually, that could have saved these people's lives, if you had gone in and did an inspection?"

"What I can say is, if he was registered, we would have inspected and brought the building up to code. So why was he never brought into court a year later? Again the fact that we are in a manual system, where everything was done with paper documents, again it's a tracking system and now it's 'computerated,' before it wasn't. What I can say is as far as whether someone followed up it, How I am going to respond to that is, if I was given a directive from a court, from a judge I would have complied with it."