Buildings Department Criticized As Too Slow on Violations

The city's Department of Buildings is again under scrutiny following an audit by the city's comptroller that claims the department is too slow in correcting building violations.

The department failed to follow up on about 20% of the violations it issued last September, neglected to reinspect buildings with long-standing multiple hazards, and completed only about a third of its required internal auditing, according to the report issued yesterday by Comptroller William Thompson Jr.

The report comes after a spate of criticism of the department that followed two fatal crane accidents and an internal shake-up surrounding the ousting of Commissioner Patricia Lancaster.

In a strongly worded letter to Mayor Bloomberg, Mr. Thompson, a likely candidate for mayor in 2009, said that "a troubling pattern of lax enforcement" as well as flawed legislative policy has resulted in "many unsafe building conditions throughout the City."

Mr. Thompson acknowledged in the report that the Department of Buildings lacks the authority to mandate inspections, a problem that he said partly accounts for the large percentage of uncorrected violations. Yet Mr. Thompson also said that no attempt was made to inspect those buildings 66% of the time, a figure the department contests. The report also claims that almost half of buildings listed as having three or more hazardous violations in 2005 have not been fixed.

A statement from the Department of Buildings called the report "misleading," saying it did not mention programs that concentrate exclusively on the most serious safety violations. "Recently, we have revised our procedures to strengthen the inspection program," the statement said.

The report was posted on the comptroller's Web site on the same day the city's acting buildings commissioner, Robert LiMandri, was in Washington testifying before Congress about the city's construction site safety standards.

Mr. LiMandri was on Capitol Hill calling for increased enforcement powers to be granted to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and was urging Congress to revise the federal tower crane regulations.

"Recently, national attention has focused on crane safety after two crane collapses in New York City, as well as other crane problems across the country. This is a call to action for all of us. In New York, we have implemented new protocols and procedures, conducted inspection sweeps of cranes and are stepping up enforcement. But, we cannot do this alone," Mr. LiMandri said.