Eight days before his mayoralty collapsed, Rob Ford was “fuming” that the elevator outside his city hall office was out of order — and his anger made the elevator a sudden priority for high-ranking city officials.

Because the problem-plagued elevator was not working, Ford was forced to take a back stairwell to the parking garage when he angrily fled an Oct. 23 media scrum where reporters asked about the reference letter he wrote for his friend Alexander “Sandro” Lisi, a convict now charged with extortion and drug dealing.

“It’s always broken,” he said at the beginning of the scrum, giving the elevator a long stare. “It’s ridiculous.”

Ford personally expressed his displeasure to the government’s top bureaucrat, city manager Joe Pennachetti. Within a week, the mayor or his aides had two meetings about the elevator with chief corporate officer Josie Scioli, who is in charge of five divisions.

Scioli’s swift response to the first meeting, on Oct. 24, offers another example of the vast behind-the-scenes influence Ford has wielded with the municipal bureaucracy.

Ford regularly summons top public servants to demand rapid action on issues that concern him — some of them minorissues that would usually be handled as non-emergencies by low-level employees. Ford’s irritation about the elevator sent Scioli scrambling for solutions.

“Please be advised Josie was called to the Mayor’s office today to discuss the elevator problem,” her executive assistant, Ann Balmain, wrote in an email to other officials and obtained through freedom of information law. “Josie requires a briefing note by 3:00 p.m. tomorrow, Friday, October 25th. The briefing note should outline the following: Why it keeps breaking down; What is the short term/long term solution; What the cost is for each. Staying with the status quo is not an option.”

Ford’s chief of staff, Dan Jacobs, noted that while the elevator is sometimes called the “mayor’s elevator,” that is not accurate: It is heavily used by councillors and members of the public as well.

“The mayor’s frustration is understandable, given that the elevator had been serviced just a short time before, and he was concerned that the public was not being best served with a breakdown taking place so quickly,” Jacobs told the Star.

Ford’s “primary concern is to ensure that members of the public have ease of access to their respective members of council,” Jacobs said. “The elevators make this possible for everyone, and are especially important to those with mobility issues.”

The briefing note was written by the city’s director of facilities operations, Mike McCoy. McCoy noted in an Oct. 24 email that Ford “was on camera fuming” about the elevator.

Scioli personally edited a draft of the briefing note before the second meeting, held on Oct. 29. In a late-night Oct. 28 email titled “Briefing note Elevator 15 version two,” she asked the chief financial officer and deputy city manager, Rob Rossini, for his thoughts on the revised version.

“Hi Rob. Covering this topic with Mayor tomorrow. Appreciate any feedback,” she wrote. Later in the email, she asked McCoy and another official, manager of capital and business analysis Marco Cuoco, if there was “any $ we can use in 2014” for a “new design” for the elevator.

Cuoco said there was already $500,000 allocated for a study of city hall’s elevators and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. But to do a new design for the elevator outside Ford’s office, Cuoco wrote, the city would have to take money from other once-planned projects that ended up being cancelled or deferred.

Since that would require approval from council, he suggested the city tap into another pool of cash.

“I know the small cap funds get used up fairly quickly, but perhaps some can be dedicated for this purpose,” Cuoco wrote.

Reporters have camped out near the elevator on dozens of occasions during Ford’s tumultuous term to seek comment from the elusive mayor — turning the elevator into an inanimate D-list celebrity among city hall observers. It even has its own Twitter parody account.

McCoy explained in the note that the elevator broke down nine times in the eight months between Nov. 2012 and July 2013, strained by “age, design and heavy use” — though he noted that the Oct. 23 outage that angered Ford was caused by downtown electrical problems, and that there had been no other breakdowns since a new contractor took over in August.

McCoy explained that “very expensive structural repairs,” costing $500,000 or more, would be necessary to permanently fix the elevator, since its design is “unique” and “the car and hoist way are small.”

Instead, McCoy recommended, the city should schedule extra off-hours maintenance inspections, though it would have to pay a “premium” fee, and direct the contractor to stock replacement parts at city hall.

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The internal emails do not say what Ford thought of these options, but McCoy later “committed” to both. McCoy did not respond to a request to reveal their precise cost.

The elevator was back in service by Oct. 24. On Oct. 31, Police Chief Bill Blair confirmed that there is a video that appears to show Ford smoking crack cocaine.

Six days after that, Ford took the elevator up from the parking garage, turned to the reporters hovering nearby, and said, “Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine.”