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NYC parking garages could receive more safety checks under newly passed legislation
By
Catalina Gonella
Published May 23, 2024
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John Lamparski / Getty Images
By
Catalina Gonella
Published May 23, 2024
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A little more than a year after the deadly collapse of a parking garage in Lower Manhattan, the New York City Council on Thursday passed a package of legislation aimed at improving the safety and maintenance of local parking structures.
All three bills were approved by wide margins, despite receiving lukewarm comments from the city’s buildings commissioner at a Council hearing late last month. They now head to Mayor Eric Adams’ office for review.
The parking garage collapse at 57 Ann St. in the Financial District in April 2023 killed the garage’s manager and injured five others. The city subsequently ramped up its inspections of garages, and in January, the Department of Buildings reported that 1 in 5 garages inspected in Manhattan had unsafe conditions, including cracking and corrosion.
Separately, the partial collapse of an apartment building in the Bronx in December 2023 temporarily displaced scores of tenants, though it did not result in any injuries. That incident spurred an investigation that led the city to suspend an engineer accused of misidentifying a structural column at the property from inspecting building exteriors for two years.
At a press conference at City Hall before councilmembers passed the legislation on Thursday, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams cited the fatal parking garage collapse and said the city must do more to prevent similar disasters in the future. She called the three proposed bills “critical.”
One of them would require the buildings department to conduct a load-bearing capacity study for parking garages, assess buildings’ integrity, and submit any findings to the mayor, Council and public. Another would double civil penalties for certain safety violations related to parking structures, while the third would amend a 2021 law to increase the frequency of inspecting them from once every six years to once every four years. The latter bill would take effect in 2028, after the initial six-year inspection period, according to a committee report.
Councilmember Crystal Hudson, who sponsored the measure, said it would serve as a proactive way to make the city’s buildings safer. “It’s the government's responsibility to guarantee the integrity of the infrastructure that shapes our communities, and that certainly includes parking structures,” she said at the press conference.
“Last year's tragedy was preventable, and hopefully this bill will prevent future tragedies from occurring,” Hudson added.
The 2021 law requires safety inspections at every New York City parking garage, with deadlines set by borough. Structures south of Central Park and on the Upper West Side were due for an inspection by the end of last year, while garages in the rest of Manhattan and Brooklyn have until the end of 2025 to comply. Garage owners in the rest of the city have until the end of 2027.
A spokesperson for Adams referred a request for comment on the bill package to the buildings department, which said its opinion on the legislation had not changed since Commissioner James Oddo testified on it in April. During his Council testimony, Oddo said the Adams administration had already taken various steps to bolster garage safety since last year and that the city currently “has a mechanism in place to escalate penalties when appropriate.”
“While the department is supportive of the intent of this legislation, it does not have the capacity to perform the comprehensive study being proposed in-house given the various factors that must be taken into consideration in order to complete the study,” he said of the first bill. “However, it should be noted that there is an ongoing effort to study the impact of electrical vehicle weights on current design loads for parking structures, which the department is very supportive of.”
Tagged
Politics
new york city
public safety
parking garages
City Council
eric adams
Catalina Gonella
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