Deadline passes for NYC parking garages to submit safety reports

NEW YORK – Thursday night was the deadline for the owners of about 4,000 New York City parking garages to submit a report on their garage’s safety. It’s a requirement the buildings department announced after last year’s deadly Ann Street garage collapse.
CBS New York investigative reporter Tim McNicholas has learned, however, more than half of those garages still haven’t submitted their report.
Harley Rogers was one of the residents forced to relocate from his Ann Street home for months after a parking garage collapsed on April 18, 2023, killing one person and injuring several others.
“I have a suspicion – every time I see a parking garage, see cracks or they’re overpacked … Could happen anywhere. These buildings are old. They’re packed with cars,” Rogers said.
Concerns like those prompted the city to require the owners of about 4,600 garages in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs to have an engineer walk through the garages and write a report on what they see.
The deadline was 11:59 p.m. Thursday, but, so far, the buildings department is still waiting on about 2,400 of those reports. The city said the reports are still coming in.
The city said they’re prepared to take any owners who don’t comply to court, which could mean a $2,500 penalty.
“We do have enforcement planned for folks that don’t comply after August 1st, but we really want the reports. We really want these parking structures to be inspected to make sure that they’re safe and they’re code-compliant,” said Yegal Shamash, deputy commissioner of the Department of Buildings.
The city said only 95 of the 2,200 reports that have already been submitted indicate unsafe conditions that need to be corrected.
Garages in Midtown, Lower Manhattan and the Upper West Side were already required to submit a more in-depth safety report by Jan. 1 of this year, but as of last week, about 300 garages still hadn’t submitted that report.
McNicholas visited one of those 300 garages, located at 257 W. 47th St., and asked why the report hadn’t been submitted. The head of the LLC that owns the garage later said an engineer already inspected and found no problems, but the garage owners mistakenly thought their report was due Aug. 1. He said he’ll be sending the report to the DOB soon, and he had no idea he was seven months late, even though the city says they’ve been fining all 300 garages about $1,000 per month.
“Does that signal to you that for some people this is maybe just a cost of doing business and they’re willing to just not comply with that regulation?” McNicholas asked Shamash.
“Well I think it’s probably that this is a new law. This is a new rule,” Shamash said.
“Folks need to not be able to write these things off, and there needs to be proper planning when looking at how to upkeep our infrastructure and to be up to code,” said City Council Member Amanda Farias.
The buildings department said they’re also considering criminal charges for some of the owners who still haven’t turned in the reports due Jan. 1.