Speaker Menin on enforcement gaps and cooling tower compliance before summer
Speaker Menin raises concerns about whether inspection and enforcement increased ahead of summer months, noting new cooling tower testing requirements took effect in May and questioning whether building owners were identified and held accountable proactively.
There are also serious questions about vacancies within the health department's broader inspection workforce and that is one of the many series of questions that we will get to today.
Today we need a clear accounting of how many water ecologists and public health inspector positions were budgeted, filled, vacant, and occupied by employees who were still onboarding or training when this outbreak occurred.
If Legionnaire's disease is a recurring public health threat, which we know it is, we should not be scrambling to build the workforce needed to address it after an outbreak has already started.
We should have been prepared.
Preparedness also means ensuring that our cooling tower laws are actually being enforced.
This past May, New York City experienced temperatures approaching 100 degrees, unusually early in the season.
New cooling tower testing requirements had also just taken effect.
We need to understand whether inspection and enforcement increased accordingly,
whether building owners who failed to comply were quickly identified, and whether the department had enough staff to proactively enforce these requirements.