This article was emailed to me by one of our local community activists...
Cleaning Up an Agency and an Accident
By Liz Krueger
In my East Side and midtown Manhattan district you will find giant cranes and new high-rise buildings on nearly a third of the densely populated blocks—the same blocks that on March 8 experienced the tragic crane accident that claimed seven lives and left scores injured and displaced from their homes.
Since then, people in my community have been asking about how an accident of this nature couldhappen, what we need to do to protect workers and residents, and why the frequency of these incidents seems to be escalating. Of course, we have now learned that whatever caused the crane to topple, we cannot rely on the city Department of Buildings’ system of inspection. At least one of its inspectors admitted he didn’t show up for the inspection.
The Problem
Our city’s approach to construction approvals andsafety has been fundamentally flawed since changes made by the Giuliani administration. Because of a lack of enforcement by the Department of Buildings, along with an extremely hot real-estate market, many developers and their contractors ignore safety requirements, disregard building codes, and violate zoning laws.
For too many years, the city has understaffed the agencies charged with oversight, has had an ineffective penalty and deterrence model, and has allowed the development and construction industry to police itself.
Either our inspection and safety protocols are wrong, the people charged with carrying them out have failed at their jobs—as was clearly the case here!—or both. There must be changesfrom the top down, starting with the resignation of Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster. The department does not have a centralized database for tracking or correlating information between stop-work orders, violations, and enforcement outcomes.
Some State Solutions
One of the biggest problems facing safe development today is the department’s self-certification process. It initiated self-certification in 1995 to help ease a permit backlog. The practice allows architects and engineers to confirm that their plans comply with applicable laws, rather than submit plans to department inspectors. Almost half of the new building permits issued in 2006 and 2007 were self-certified.
While I don’t question that the majority of architects and engineers are professionals who would not make false certifications, the city’s agency charged with ensuring the public’s safety cannot continue to abdicate its responsibility. A 2003 city comptroller’s audit found that 67 percent of the self-certified construction plans it looked at had errors.
The Department of Buildings must immediately end self-certification for the construction of all high-rise buildings. These projects are radically more complex and risky than the construction of smaller buildings or single-family homes.
Since the city has been resistant to mandating stricter safety standards, and the department isn’t moving forward on its own, there is a role for the state to play. Here are just some of the bills currently in the Senate and/or Assembly:
1) Increase penalties and professional sanctions for those who show patterns of violating regulations, safety standards and zoning laws.
2) Require the department to reinspect and abate hazardous violations and significantly increase the oversight of development sites, making it a priority to inspect sites with histories of violations.
3) Mandate clear lines of responsibility for developers, contractors, and their subcontractors. In the crane collapse of March 8, the developer says that he is not responsible because he contracted out the construction, and that contractor in turn subcontracted to a crane company. The current guidelines are not clear enough, leading to complex litigation with each incident that occurs.
New legislation can provide more tools to our agencies. But the city needs to enforce the laws that are on the books and provide the department with the resources it needs to conduct full inspections, prioritizing them by the size of the project and the risks involved.
Raising the City’s Standards
Reports indicate that the crane collapse may have happened because a strap used to stabilize the crane was damaged or frayed and could not bear the load. While Buildings Department records showed that the site, including the crane, had been inspected shortly before the accident, we have since learned that at least some of those inspections did not take place.
City officials were called in to inspect complaints on the site. At least one inspector failed to show up, but submitted reports that indicated everything was fine. Assuming others did show up as required, did they know what to look for? Did they see the problems? Did they cross-check to see if the 14 outstanding safety violations at the site had been resolved? As Robert Guskind of the Web site Gowanus Lounge says, even if the department “functioned like a well-oiled machine that rigorously enforced city regulations, its inspectors are still overwhelmed by the level of construction.” I agree.
In many instances, the city’s response to violations has been something like: “It’s already done, so there is nothing we can do.” In the case of most violations issued, the developer goes before the Environmental Control Board. However, the board often won’t hear complaints for months, the developer can easily get hearings postponed, and the fines are usually so small that they are considered “the cost of doing business.” Fines need to be enforced in a timely way, and dramatically increased to serve as an adequate deterrent.
The Department’s Role
In December, the Daily News reported that Commissioner Lancaster had signed a stipulation promising an architect accused of violations at 32 sites that shewould not report the “alleged misdeeds to any regulatory agency,” including one that could revoke his license.
In another instance, a Brooklyn developer was found to have 48 violations from one development—the same development he certified at 100 percent compliance. The developer of the site of the crane accident had 14 violations. Though none were deemed extremely serious, there should be a clearly defined timeline during which developers must bring their sites up to code or be forced to stop their work. This must occur within hours, or at most days, not months or years.
New York should not accept amodel of construction safety that relies on a neighbor seeing something wrong and reporting it. The role of the department should be to prevent problems beforehand. If the city is unable to provide more money for staffing, then the cost of permits must be raised enough to fund new inspectors and a faster penalty system. A study conducted by then-Assemblymember (now Manhattan borough president) Scott Stringer in 2002 revealed that the city could generate more than $10 million a year to hire additional inspectors by actually collecting the fines the Environmental Control Board issues.
The lack of enforcement, oversight, and accountability within the Department of Buildings allows those developers and construction firms who put profit before the safety of the public and their workers to shirk city and state laws and codes.
Liz Krueger, a Democrat, is a state senator from Manhattan’s East Side. A longer version of this article appeared in the Gotham Gazette, www.gothamgazette.com
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