The union representing city attorneys says attorneys assigned to the Department of Buildings have been inundated with cases, including numerous that cannot be won.
The Civil Service Bar Association, which has about 1,000 members, says the workload is such that the DOB's 30 attorneys often work during their lunch hours to keep up with the caseload. The torrent has given lawyers minimal time to prepare for those cases that deserve attention, the union says.
CSBA officials said the employer has continued despite promises by DOB leaders to ease the workload, which the union said included a glut of cases imposing unfair burdens on smaller homeowners by forcing them to pay. fines or hiring legal advisers to fight petty cases, at the expense of matters involving larger companies whose violations are more egregious.
"The department looks for easy things," like improper connections for washing machines, said Abbie Gorin, a CSBA commercial agent, during a recent interview. "Instead of focusing their efforts on the big people, they are multiplying the fines against the little people ... They are grabbing everything they can find."
He said the efforts of CSBA Chairman Saul Fishman and himself to quell discontent among lawyers by having the DOB adjust the way it pursues cases were rejected by Commissioner Melanie La Rocca early in her tenure. in May 2019.
Gorin said a proposal by him and Fishman that the DOB institute an alternative sentencing program promoted by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which they said had a non-recidivism rate of more than 90 percent, was rejected.
โShe stopped us in our tracks and said, 'don't expect any change from me,'โ the union leader said.
DOB cites 'multiple' meetings
The DOB called the union's claims exaggerated at best, and said Ms. La Rocca and senior department staff have met with CSBA officials "multiple times," including three times in the past 18 months. , to discuss those issues.
According to the agency, most of the smaller violations issued by department inspectors that do not pose an immediate danger are eligible for the so-called CURE process, which gives homeowners the ability to fix the condition without having to answer in court and without incurring fines.
Last month, the department also launched a new program that allows one- and two-family homeowners who have not received violations on the property in question in the previous five years to correct conditions before receiving a violation notice and associated fines.
โOur top priority at DOB is protecting the safety of our fellow New Yorkers. The work of every unit in the Department, including the efforts of our dedicated attorneys, is critical to this life-preserving mission, โsaid a DOB spokesman, Andrew Rudansky, in an email.
He rejected the union's claims that the agency's attorneys were dealing with an excessive number of cases and dismissed allegations that they were forced to work during their lunch hours. Mr. Rudansky said that despite requests for documentation of such cases, none have been received. He said attorneys who work overtime or during lunch breaks should and would be paid for that time.
"We do not believe that any unit in the Department is tasked with an unreasonable workload," Rudansky said.
But a former attorney for the department said the DOB was so poorly managed that attorneys groped through cases, often without vital documentation and enough time to prepare the case.
Brian Nettle, who worked at the agency from October 2019 to mid-August, said the main reason he left the DOB was because of "the inability to present our cases adequately," in part because the databases of The department's record keeping were very deficient for attorney purposes.
He cited a recent morning when he received a case load of more than a dozen subpoenas involving five or six different locations, for which he had 30 minutes to prepare. That half hour was barely enough to download the necessary documentation, Nettle said.
โIt was like I was working where no one cared about responsibility at all. It was wild, โhe said.
Although the ability to confer in person with witnesses and others was understandably disrupted by the pandemic, when things got remote, the DOB did little or nothing to address the resulting shortcomings, he said. The paperwork, including the entire evidence files, was "lost."
Nettle, who intends to litigate matters of public interest, said management of the Department's Administrative Enforcement Unit, which enforces relevant city building codes, did little to resolve those deficiencies and declined to meet with concerned lawyers, including himself.
"Nobody was taking responsibility for anything, at a minimal level," he said.
However, Mr. Rudansky said the department had made a number of significant improvements in the past 18 months to enable its attorneys to work diligently and successfully from home.
"Our internal databases are more than adequate to prepare for remote OATH hearings, as evidenced by the high success rate of our dedicated courtroom attorneys," which he said in an email accounted for about 80 percent violations. issued by the department in OATH.
Photo above, courtesy of the Department of Buildings.
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