Joseph asks if DOB is staffed to respond quickly to district complaints
Council Member Rita Joseph raises a troubled project on Bedford Avenue in her district and asks whether DOB has the staff, infrastructure, and response timeline to handle safety complaints as the city builds block by block; Tigani cites 609 inspectors, faster hiring with OMB, and response times from three hours for priority A to about four days for priority D.
Thank you, Chair.
Similar concerns as my colleague, and I've called on several occasions about this one project in my district on Bedford Avenue.
That's become a nightmare for me for safety issues, constituents call.
How staffed up is your office to deal with these in rapid time?
And what's the timeline when we call you for these things to happen?
This is constant.
Bedford Avenue is my little project now that I hope DOB can help solve.
Shaking of the ground when they were building.
And stop issues are only for 24 hours.
to me about are you staffed up enough to, as we continue to develop the city, we want to build block by block.
Do you have the capacity?
Do you have the infrastructure to support all of these things?
So the 609 inspectors, the overall inspector force, actually represents one of our highest totals in recent years, probably since 2020.
Additionally, the changes this year in partnership with OMB to move forward faster with the hiring process has allowed us to fill vacancies even before getting the additional lines, which is going to be a huge
compliment to increasing that force and responding more quickly.
On construction safety enforcement that's related to construction safety sites on our major sites, our priority A response, that's about three hours.
Priority B response is about one to two days.
Priority C and priority D is closer to four days.
And then I would say that in addition to our traditional borough enforcement work between 8 and 4, we do have real-time enforcement, which gets to a construction site within 12 hours.
And then when there is a serious major hazardous issue, we can deploy our emergency response team, our ERT team, overnight and on weekends.