Accountability alphabet: NYC DoB EPA WTC. . . wtf?

That little cheer you heard on Tuesday afternoon, rising above the noxious symphony of a thousand backhoes and jackhammers that serves as the soundtrack for lower Manhattan these days, well, that was me, celebrating the news that the embattled head of New York City’s Department of Buildings, Pat “Splat” Lancaster, had finally stepped up and stepped down.

Lancaster, who has served as Commissioner for the entire reign of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was originally tasked with modernizing the DoB. . . which, under Bloody Mike, meant making it run more smoothly so that developers (don’t call them greedy, just call them Mike’s “base”) could demolish old New York, build their banal office towers, super-luxury high-rises, and boondoggle developments, and cash out before term limits forced a change at City Hall.

And to that end, I’d have to say Lancaster’s tenure has been an, er, um, smashing success.

Bloomberg continued to make it clear that in his idea of New York, you have to break some eggs to make Mike’s “revitalized” breakfast (construction work is “complicated,” he said on Tuesday), but, much to his chagrin, Lancaster used these “raw materials” to make a garbage omelet.

Ms. Lancaster not only presided over increases in construction-related deaths and injuries for most of this decade, several high-profile disasters like last year’s Deutsche Bank fire and last month’s crane collapse revealed an agency that consistently failed to perform some of its most basic tasks. Safety inspections were not done, complaints of unsafe conditions were not taken seriously, building violations were allowed to mount with little consequence, and zoning restrictions were ignored. This year’s thirteen construction deaths have already surpassed 2007’s dirty dozen, but Lancaster’s position remained safe until she made an absolute idiot of herself at a public hearing of the City Council last Thursday. (She not only fessed up—sort of—to ignoring zoning restrictions on the building that spawned the crane collapse, she was unable to identify any other dangerous sites that she and her agency had previously been asked to find and fix.)

Well, doing bad is one thing, but, to media mogul Mike, looking bad is another—so, on Monday, the mayor distanced himself from Lancaster, and, on Tuesday, he “accepted her resignation” (at least he thinks that’s how it went down—he really didn’t sound too sure).

It remains to be seen what Lancaster has to say for herself now that she has been set adrift from the Good Ship Gracie Mansion, but if she were feeling the strain of tiny budgets and untoward influences while she held a position of power, then she owed it to the citizens of New York to stand up and say something. Her relative silence in the face of years of construction disasters was all I needed to, uh, hear to know that Splat wasn’t doing her job. . .

. . . though paragraphs like the following also make that pretty damn clear:

Her defenders, including a number of developers, said that Ms. Lancaster, 54, had been unfairly blamed for the failings of an antiquated and underfinanced department with a long history of corruption, inefficiency and missing records.

“She did a terrific job in getting the department back on track,” the developer Douglas Durst said.

. . . .

She built a considerable following in the industry she helped regulate.

“I think the world of Patricia Lancaster,” said Richard T. Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, a trade group. “I think she accomplished an enormous amount.”

Calling her “a shining star,” he added, “If you look at her six-year record, it’s overwhelmingly positive.”

It is very worth noting that the only quotes singing Lancaster’s praises came from the industry that she was supposed to regulate—the Times had none to offer from the people that she was supposed to protect.

It kind of gives new substance to six years of accusations that Lancaster was too cozy with developers and contractors.

Lie down with dogs, and you get a dog’s dinner.

And while we’re on the subject of lying, let’s take a moment to address yesterday’s ruling in the case of former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman.

In February of 2006, I wrote with more than a little personal interest about the ruling by Manhattan Federal Judge Deborah Batts that residents of the neighborhoods surrounding the World Trade Center could sue Whitman for lying about air quality in the aftermath of the Twin Towers’ collapse.

“Whitman's deliberate and misleading statements to the press, where she reassured the public that the air was safe to breathe around lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that there would be no health risk presented to those returning to those areas, shocks the conscience,” Judge Batts wrote.

“By these actions,” Batts added, Mrs. Whitman “increased, and may have in fact created, the danger” to people living and working near the trade center.

About 50,000 personal computers, 424,000 tons of concrete, 2,000 tons of asbestos, and untold tons of other toxic junk were turned to dust when the towers fell. I was walking around in a stupid surgical mask for days afterwards—I’d gag and cough when I took it off. That’s not a scientific assessment, but, apparently, neither was Christie’s.

Now, more than two years and several WTC Syndrome fatalities later, a federal appeals court has overturned Judge Batts.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals said that Mrs. Whitman, a former governor of New Jersey, was forced to balance competing interests after the attack. The court found that complying with instructions from the White House to hasten the return of financial workers to Wall Street as soon as possible after the World Trade Center was destroyed conflicted with Mrs. Whitman’s obligation to highlight the health risks facing people who lived, worked or went to school in Lower Manhattan.

“Whether or not Whitman’s resolution of such competing considerations was wise,” the court said, “she has not engaged in conduct that ‘shocks the conscience’ in the sense necessary to create constitutional liability for damages to thousands of people.”

The competing interests of. . . wait, let me get this straight. . . the interest of lying to cover for the president’s lies is competing with the interest of protecting the health and well-being of the citizenry. I am almost speechless (almost). If Christie Whitman’s conduct doesn’t shock the conscience, the idea that there was a balance to be struck between these “interests” most certainly does.

Well, if the head of the government agency tasked with testing the air quality isn’t accountable for her lies because she had to consider the interests of the White House, then surely someone higher up in the Bush Administration must be accountable, right?

[crickets]

Where does the buck stop around here—in the country, in New York City—where? Is any public servant ever going to be held responsible for what they do (as opposed to being held responsible for whom they do. . . well, at least if that official is a Democrat) while entrusted with the care of the people that pay their salaries?

Be it buildings falling down or building going up, it seems increasingly clear that the answer is “no.” If you are not rich, powerful, of a friend thereof, if you need the protection of the NYC DoB or the US EPA, well then, I’m afraid that you are SOL.


(cross-posted on guy2k, The Seminal, and Daily Kos)

Heckuva job, Patty

News broke late Thursday that a city buildings inspector had been arrested and charged with lying to New York City authorities about an inspection he was supposed to have performed earlier this month on the crane that collapsed in Turtle Bay on Saturday, killing seven and injuring dozens more. Concerns about the stability of the crane were called in to the city’s 311 complaint line on March 3rd. The inspector, Edward J. Marquette, never visited the construction site, but filed falsified reports claiming that he had.

The head of the NYC Department of Buildings, Patricia J. Lancaster, who, amazingly, still has her job, suspended Mr. Marquette, and sought to have the last six months of his inspection reports reexamined. But, it should be noted, that discovery and investigation of the inspector’s alleged criminal activity was conducted by the City’s Department of Investigations, and not Lancaster’s DoB.

And what about the matter that has shown such a bright light on the 51st Street site? Not an issue here, says Patty:

With regard to the crane accident itself, it is highly unlikely that a March 4 inspection would have prevented the horrific accident that happened on March 15, which we are still looking at the probable cause being mechanical failure or human failure during the ‘jumping’ operations when the crane was raised.

The New York Times City Room reports that Lancaster said the lack of an inspection of the complaint about the stability of the crane, “Was probably not even ‘remotely associated’ with the collapse.”

Oh, well, then, it’s not your problem, is it? Heckuva job, Patty.

While the parts of the crane that are now believed to be the root cause of the collapse (and I will note that is only “believed” to be the cause—the investigation is not complete by a long stretch—and several local news channels have reported that there were numerous serious problems with the way this crane had been set up, beyond the failing straps and collar that may have started the fatal chain reaction on Saturday) might not have been the parts that a March 4th inspection would have targeted, Lancaster misses the bigger—and I would say, quite obvious—point.

If an inspector could so easily mislead the DoB about a routine investigation of a civilian complaint, how can Lancaster be sure that her department is doing the inspections that would be “associated”—remotely or otherwise—with such dangerous situations? In fact, how do we as city residents know that our calls to 311 are even investigated at all?

This inspector’s alleged fraud is a symptom of a bigger problem.

During the 1990s, the city gave up on the function of building inspection, without issuing an official declaration of surrender. Year after year, graft scandals would wipe out dozens of inspectors at a time. By the end of 2001, the number of inspectors had dwindled to 277 from about 800 in the early 1990s. Developers were left to operate on what amounted to an honor system. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the department had become “severely understaffed and deeply demoralized” by the time he took office in January 2002 — at the very moment that the city was beginning a surge in new building.

. . . .

In December, a nylon sling on a crane snapped, and seven tons of steel fell onto Murray Street in Lower Manhattan from the 25th floor of a construction site, severely injuring an architect, Robert Woo. A few weeks later, in January, Yuriy Vanchytskyy, a construction worker, fell 42 stories from a hotel on Spring Street being built by Donald Trump.

Awful as these accidents were, they hardly begin to describe the human price of growth in New York. The city’s construction business, particularly outside of Manhattan, is becoming the modern version of the 19th-century coal mine.

Between early 2006 and the middle of 2007, 44 people died on construction sites, 40 of them in nonunion jobs involving immigrants, said Louis Coletti, the president of an association of builders. Most of those deaths took place in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, records show. Miczyslaw Piatek, 52, was digging a foundation in Brooklyn when the cinder-block wall next door collapsed on him. The wall had not been shored up, a federal investigation found.

The number of inspectors has increased somewhat under Mayor Bloomberg (there are now 426. . . make that 425), but that growth does not begin to meet the needs of an industry that expects another $45 billion of construction this decade.

While the alleged behavior of Mr. Marquette is inexcusable, the inspector, who it is reported made an annual salary of $48,000, and, more importantly, his colleagues are no doubt over-extended. Perhaps it is shocking that an inspector just skipped doing his job and falsified records, but if Marquette had visited the site and done a hurried or insufficient inspection, would he have even been caught? Indeed, would he have even been guilty of a specific crime?

Jim Dwyer, who wrote the column that I quote above, reports that “colleagues say“ Lancaster is “capable and dedicated,” and that the DoB is just outgunned by the wealthy real estate and construction industries. That may be so, but some of the 45 billion bucks have to stop somewhere.

Patricia Lancaster has had six years to repair the damage to her department. If Mayor Michael Bloomberg has not given her the resources to do that job properly, then it is well past the time that she should have protested—publicly and loudly.

A system in which a building inspector can skip inspections and still cross them off his list is a system that is, like that Harlem building, past repair. It is broken. As Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said in a statement:

What more evidence do we need? It is clear we cannot trust the Buildings Department to keep construction sites safe. We need now a complete top-to-bottom independent review of this department, its procedures and its personnel.

And we need much bigger fines for violations and criminal penalties for serial violators. We also need a system that stops work more quickly on buildings with multiple violations—even if no single violation is considered serious enough in itself to merit a stoppage.

Because a series of small violations should be seen as I see the inspections scandal, as a symptom that something bigger is amiss. It could be viewed as the regulatory equivalent of “broken windows” policing.

But ultimately, we need someone to take responsibility for what is happening. The rampant development that has outstripped our ability to regulate it has been encouraged at the highest levels of city and state government. If the elected officials who depend so heavily on donations from real estate developers lack the political will to protect the citizens of New York, then it is up to the appointed bureaucrats—the supposed experts—to live up to their sworn duties. It might take perseverance and courage, but the office and the people—your friends, neighbors, and family—deserve no less.

Patricia J. Lancaster, it’s time to step up, or step down.


(h/t Gowanus Lounge and Lost City)


(cross-posted on guy2k, Daily Kos, and The Seminal)