Everyone Agrees: DOB Penalties Must Rise
The current edition of the Fort Greene Courier recounts the public forum with the city’s Task Force on Operations and Improvement of the Department of Buildings held at P.S. 207 a week and a half ago. With fewer than 50 people in attendance, the turn-out was clearly something of a disappointment, the tone a mix…
The current edition of the Fort Greene Courier recounts the public forum with the city’s Task Force on Operations and Improvement of the Department of Buildings held at P.S. 207 a week and a half ago. With fewer than 50 people in attendance, the turn-out was clearly something of a disappointment, the tone a mix of anger and resignation. The Department of Buildings has been broken for a very long time, said Councilmember James Oddo, chair of the task force. But there comes a point in time when you have to stop yelling at them and work with them. Doing away with self-certification was mulled over, but rejected as impractical. There are days when I want to do away with self-certification, Oddo said. But there aren’t enough inspectors. You’ll wait years for a project. There has to be a happy medium. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that the penalties for violations must be made much more severe. In light of Bloomberg finally paying attention to the worker safety issue, there’s some reason to be optimistic that the consequences of flouting zoning restrictions or neglecting safety measures may actually increase to the point where contractors and developers start paying attention. Let’s hope so.
Ranting & Raving Aside, DOB Needs Help [FG Courier]
Photo by Andrew Coulter Enright
Self-certification will never be done away with because the real estate industry runs the city and owns every member of the city council, especially Melinda Katz, the chair of the land use committee. And increasing fines is nice but first you have to hire more inspectors to catch the violations, otherwise increasing the penalties is pointless.
Designing and then getting a project built in NYC is the reason we have the least progressive Architecture in the world. Professional Certification was not the answer. Writing a clear concise Building Code and Zoning Resolution might be a start.
Bloomberg a nice guy? Yeah, okay if by nice you mean give the working class the shaft and sucking developer dick every chance you get especially if your last name is Rattner or Scarano and you happen to have a cool couple million dollars to eventually contribute to a presidential fund.
How does a synagogue get built in Williamsburg in two weeks? By ignoring DOB inspectors and stop work orders. Go figure that out.
WOOF WOOF!
The place is out and out corrput. Bloomberg is too much of a nice guy to fix it. We need someone a bit nastier.
Have any of you folks every been in line to get a permit at the DOB?
If you don’t have a “good relationship” with the inspectors at the counter, most of them treat you like sh*t.
I agree with Dan. The big players who hire guys like Scarano seem to get away with whatever they want, while the small fries (with less resources)have trouble getting the smallest projects built.
I work for a small firm in Manhattan. A project that we did a self certification on, a bathroom addition to a basement storage room(really!) just got audited. There is only one sheet of drawings and the comments by the examiner were pointless and easily adressed by having said examiner READ THE PAPERWORK AGAIN. It really drives me and my colleagues nuts that playing by the rules and trying to do good projects gets you nowhere in this town but breaking all the rules seems to have no real consequences(see:R.Scarrano). If there’s a better definition of a system that is corrupt and broken it’s one in which obeying the rules has no benefits.
OK
My comments should have been made about those silly HPD violations.
I agree DOB violations are more serious.