In the weeks before last month’s deadly Oakland halfway house fire, Alameda County paid thousands of dollars to the program’s operator, the Rev. Jasper Lowery, with the expectation he would vacate the building by April 1, those close to the agreement say.

But after getting the money, Lowery, of Urojas Community Services, instead dug in and continued to fight the nonprofit’s pending eviction.

Four people died in the March 27 fire at the three-story apartment building, four were hospitalized, and dozens were displaced. A burning candle was blamed.

Fire Department crews called to the building at 2551 San Pablo Ave. had noted the building’s dangerous conditions as far back as January, but it wasn’t until three days before the fire that a city fire inspector finally documented 11 serious violations — including extension cords running between rooms — and ordered fixes.

One of the central questions raised by the fire is who was responsible for the poor conditions in the building, with the owner and Urojas pointing fingers at each other. It turns out, the county itself may have played a role.

There are conflicting estimates on just how much money the county spent to help subsidize Lowery’s halfway house there, though Urojas clients had been been receiving financial support from the Behavioral Health Care Services division for years.

Lowery’s attorney, James Cook, estimated his client was being paid $18,000 a month to house about 40 people on the site. He also was collecting an average of $600 a month from each tenant, Cook said.

But the building’s owner, Keith Kim, says he had reduced Urojas’ rent to $16,000 in 2015 after Lowery complained he couldn’t come up with the remaining $2,000. Then, starting last year, Lowery began giving him just $10,000 a month before he stopped paying altogether in November, Kim said.

That was about the time the county suspended payments to Urojas, and Kim began pressing to evict the nonprofit’s management for falling behind on its rent.

Kim said he wanted another service provider to run the re-entry program. Oakland City Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney began working with him to find a replacement and tried to broker an amicable agreement to get Lowery out.

In early March, McElhaney arranged for a sit-down between Lowery and Kim in her City Hall office that Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson’s operations chief, Aisha Brown, also attended.

In a subsequent March 14 email to Lowery’s attorney, McElhaney seemed to suggest the parties had struck a deal, in which Urojas had agreed “to voluntarily vacate its operations from the facility no later than 4/1.”

McElhaney said Urojas would take “some of their clients that they could house in other facilities” and leave others to enter agreements with the program’s new provider, Dignity Housing West.

In exchange, McElhaney wrote, building owner Kim would drop the eviction effort against Urojas and forgive an estimated $92,000 in back rent. McElhaney also said the county had “agreed to restore payments to Urojas for current services.”

Contacted last week, Supervisor Carson, who provided Urojas with $25,000 in health money from an Alameda County sales tax measure five years ago, said he was looking into the matter. But he said he had no immediate “information regarding Urojas Community Services and their contractual nor financial relationship to Alameda County.”

County Supervisor Nate Miley, who described himself as a supporter of Lowery’s, said: “It is my understanding that we did resume payment — that’s what (county) staff communicated to me.” Those payments apparently resumed in early March.

Miley said the money was intended “to help Pastor Lowery and keep the facility available for the services he was providing.”

“He needed resources to do a quality job,” Miley said.

Calls and emails last week to several county agencies and officials seeking information about the size and nature of the payment to Lowery either went unanswered or were redirected to the acting Health Care Services Director Rebecca Gebhart, who didn’t respond to repeated inquiries.

Late Friday, in response to a public records request for all payments to Lowery and Urojas covering the past five years, the Alameda County Counsel’s Office sent us copies of only a handful of records — the most recent being a $5,000 grant from the Probation Department to Urojas staff to attend an orientation and training dealing with “re-entry” clients.

The counsel staff told us they were continuing to search for documents and would update us in a week or two.

Media consultant Sam Singer, who represents Kim, said his client got a phone call from Lowery in early March saying the county had paid him about $25,000 to vacate the building, but then “God had told him not leave.”

Lowery’s attorney, Cook, acknowledged last week that his client had asked for $190,000 as part of an agreement to leave within three months, but initially said he was unaware the county had resumed payments to Lowery or that any exit deal had been cut.

On Friday, however, Cook said Lowery had informed him the county had restarted the payments to him in early March, though he didn’t know the amount.

Anyway, he said, “There was no contingency that he move out. To say that is completely incorrect.”

For her part, Councilwoman McElhaney said she wasn’t aware of the details of the county payment and that her focus had been on getting volunteers to do the “massive repairs” needed to bring the building back up to snuff.

“I thought we had an agreement in framework around how everyone could work together to expedite the repairs to the units,” she said. “My understanding is those discussions fell apart, and I was waiting for (Kim and Lowery) to get back to me.”