Council Considers Violation-Removal Bill

by Jenny Laurie

If City Councilmember Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn) gets his way, landlords will have a new way to remove violations in their buildings from the public records.

He has sponsored Intro 994, a bill which would allow landlords to hire licensed architects and engineers to file statements with the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development swearing that the violations have been fixed. The city, on receiving the affidavits, would have to clear the violations from the official record. Tenants would not have to be notified.

After scores of angry tenants showed up for a September 16 hearing on the bill held by the Council’s housing and buildings committee, Weiner said he would revise the bill. But as it stands now, the bill would add a third option to the two ways landlords now have to get violations removed from the city’s records. Once an inspector visits an apartment or building (usually after a tenant complains about lack of heat, peeling paint or other problems), any violations found are entered in HPD’s official records. The landlord has a short period after that (how long depends on the seriousness of the violation) to fix the problems and file a sworn statement with the city saying the problem no longer exists, a process called self-certification.

The tenants who complained are notified that the landlord said he fixed the problem, and they must tell the city if the landlord lied. If the tenants don’t answer, the violation is assumed cleared and the record of it is removed. If the landlord doesn’t file within the short period, the violation stays on the building’s record forever, unless an inspector comes again and sees that the problem was fixed.

The second way the violation can be cleared is under the city’s dismissal-request program. If the landlord missed the first period of self-certification, he or she can pay HPD $350 to send out an inspector to look at violations and remove them from the record. In this process, the inspector can see if the landlord actually removed the violation correctly and can check for new hazardous violations as well.

"This bill does not address the main weaknesses in the current code-enforcement system," says Anne Pasmanick of the Community Training and Resource Center. "There are not enough inspectors and the city does not have an effective emergency-repair system."

Weiner’s intention, according to an aide, was to help landlords who are trying to sell or refinance their buildings. Because of a shortage of inspectors, landlords must wait a long time to get reinspections, and uncorrected violations make prospective buyers or lenders reluctant. The aide contends that this is especially difficult for smaller owners.

However, at the September 16 hearing, Weiner claimed that he was trying to solve the problem that exists because so many owners file false certifications.

The false-certification issue was the main sticking point for many of the speakers at that hearing: An alarming number of landlords commit fraud under the current system. In a 1995 audit by Comptroller Alan Hevesi, inspections showed that 40 percent of landlords filing sworn affidavits lied when they said that violations had been repaired. HPD officials admitted that their own examinations showed a very high incidence of false certifications.

According to Pasmanick, Weiner’s bill would "simply add a whole set of new players, the architects and engineers, to the system. Even though they are skilled at examining buildings, they come to the process as the landlords’ employees, and this creates a conflict of interest. Since this bill has no sanctions for committing fraud, it does nothing to improve the code-enforcement system."

Met Council organizer Deborah Schutt, testifying against the bill, stated the issue succinctly: "Self-certification is a license to lie."

HPD officials also pointed out a number of other problems. Under the bill’s provisions, they said, an owner with lead-paint violations who is facing an imminent lawsuit by the city could use an architect or engineer to falsely certify that the violations had been removed. They told the committee that such false certifications would seriously hinder their efforts to force landlords to fix such hazardous, life-threatening conditions as peeling lead paint and lack of heat.

Another issue raised by the bill’s opponents was that it would do nothing to help small owners in low-income neighborhoods. "For those owners, it is much cheaper to participate in the city’s dismissal-request program, where they can get a reinspection for $350 -- the fee covers anywhere from one violation to five million violation, as long as they are in the same building," said Pasmanick. "Hiring an architect or engineer is much more expensive and much more likely to be done by the big owners."