Glendale Civic sues City and DOB

For years, the Glendale Civic Association has called for a crackdown on building contractors who cut corners, and now they are in the process of filing a lawsuit against the City of New York and the Department of Buildings (DOB).
The lawsuit calls on the DOB to end its &#8220Professional Certification Program,” which allows Professional Engineers (PE) and Registered Architects (RA) to certify building plans without a review by the City. The suit claims that the Professional Certification Program is in direct violation of the role given to the DOB under the New York City Charter, Administrative Code, and State Constitution. In addition, the suit asks the DOB to enforce existing laws, codes, rules, and regulations.
The Civic's lawyer, Gabriel Tapalaga, said that the next scheduled court date for the issue is Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - the City needs at least 40 days to respond to the suit.
DOB spokesperson Jennifer Givner confirmed that the lawsuit had been filed and that the agency had received notice of it, but said that the DOB does not comment on pending litigation.
Civic President Kathy Masi said that the group has called on the DOB to make the changes for years, but two years ago, she began to feel that her complaints were falling on deaf ears.
&#8220We have a lot of things going on: complete overhauls passed off as alterations, inappropriate buildings in the wrong zones, expanded single family homes into multi-family dwellings,” she said. &#8220I've decided that we are going to take a stand.”
&#8220Let's see if we can at least try to fix this on a go ahead basis,” she said of what she hoped the suit would achieve.
A meeting about the issue several months ago at the Civic drew nearly 450 people, she said, and Masi testified at City Council-sponsored hearings at P.S. 113 to address the problems of enforcement and over-development.
&#8220The Civic has submitted its findings to the Building Commissioner and her Queens Commissioners. Nevertheless, the Buildings Department has ignored the concerns of the community and has continuously permitted known violators to continue to operate with immunity. This must be stopped before the character of our community is forever lost,” Masi said.
At the crux of their argument is the issue of the &#8220Professional Certification Program,” implemented by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to speed up the permit process, which then took between four and six weeks.
&#8220Self-certification is by its very nature a program rife with the potential for fraud and abuse. The self-certification program gives those being paid by the contractors or land-owners the authority to approve building plans with little or no review from the Buildings Department,” Tapalaga said.
Under Professional Certification, 20 percent of plans are audited at random each year, Givner said. Moreover, although the City's DOB cannot suspend or revoke licenses of PEs or RAs who violate code - since the State licenses both - the DOB can suspend or revoke their ability to certify projects, she said.