The Department of Buildings‘ review of new building plans has slowed to a crawl because the city agency is getting buried under an avalanche of permit applications.
According to the most recent agency performance report from the Mayor’s Office of Operations, when it comes to new buildings it is taking the city’s DOB nearly twice as long to complete the first plan review, which is the period from the complete submission of the application to the date the plan examiner is able to issue a decision upon the submitted plans. That process has risen to an average of 15.7 days in the fiscal year to date compared with 8.5 in the previous FYTD, the data indicate.
In addition, it takes 16 percent longer, or a total of 13.3 days, to complete a first plan review of a building project requiring significant alterations (called Alteration Type 1 or Alt-1) versus 11.5 days year-over-year. And that number could be skewed, one real estate pro said, by projects that are considered Alt-1s, but don’t require a lot of work, like change of use.
Anyone else think this will be used as an excuse to change procedures to allow for even more lax oversight of developers?
3 comments:
Maybe that is because a whole buch of DOB inspectors were just arrested in a recent bust....leaving them short handed. LOL!
The real solution is to ban all new construction. Only allow repairs on buildings that are standing. Then we wouldn't have any backlog, and we would be able to address the overpopulation here.
But they will still collect all the same fees, and then not use those fees to hire more staff.
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