Three months after a safety inspector admitted to falsifying hundreds of reports concluding that buildings were free of cancer-causing asbestos, the city agency that licensed him — and still licenses nearly 550 others — says it has taken steps to ensure better oversight.
The agency, the Department of Environmental Protection, which certifies the private inspectors who test buildings and construction sites, says the measures include sharing information with federal, state and city agencies, computerizing its filing system and substantially increasing audits and spot checks of inspectors in the field.
The changes, the result of a two-month internal review, were outlined in a June 28 memorandum to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg from the environmental agency’s commissioner, Cas Holloway. The agency provided a copy of the five-page memorandum to The New York Times.
The review, an agency official said, was prompted by an article in The Times in late April about the inspector, Saverio F. Todaro, 68, who had admitted in federal court a month earlier that he falsified the reports. Mr. Todaro pleaded guilty to federal environmental crimes, fraud and making false statements; he faces as long as five years in prison when he appears next month before a judge for sentencing.
Mr. Todaro, who operated an environmental inspection and testing company, acknowledged that he had submitted clean asbestos and lead test results for at least a decade without performing any tests.
The scope and audacity of his crimes and the apparent ease with which he got away with them suggested that the agency’s oversight was weak and raised questions about the integrity of the work of other inspectors.
A spokesman for the environmental agency, Farrell Sklerov, however, said that the two-month review, and a substantial increase in office audits and field visits since it began, found no indications that such conduct was widespread.
But the investigation that led to the charges against Mr. Todaro, by the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, the city Department of Investigation and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, is not over, and the authorities have suggested that more charges may be brought, though it is unclear whether they would focus on more inspectors.
The city environmental agency regulates private asbestos inspectors, who play an important role in what has long been viewed as one of the more corrupt sectors of the construction industry. The agency sets the procedures and establishes requirements for training and certification.
The inspectors, formally known as certified asbestos investigators, are hired by building owners and developers to assess apartments and buildings set to undergo renovation or demolition, because inhaling asbestos can cause lung disease and cancer. The assessments can have a major impact on the cost and duration of a project, since cleanup or abatement can be expensive and time consuming.
A surprising aspect of Mr. Todaro’s case was that his certification was suspended in 2004 by the environmental agency, which cited poor building surveys and improper record keeping.
But because of a lack of communication between city agencies, he was able to keep performing asbestos assessments and avoid scrutiny. He continued to file assessments with the city’s Buildings Department, enabling developers to obtain permits to demolish or renovate, because the Department of Environmental Protection had not notified the Buildings Department of his suspension.
“The fact that Mr. Todaro continued to conduct asbestos-related investigations following the suspension of his license raised concerns about whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to ensure that only properly licensed C.A.I.’s conduct asbestos investigations in New York City,” Mr. Holloway wrote in the memo.
The environmental agency also failed to notify the State Department of Labor, which licenses asbestos abatement companies, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Mr. Holloway said that partly because of this lapse, his agency had instituted a data-sharing and notification system with the federal E.P.A., the New York State Departments of Environmental Conservation, Labor and Health and several city agencies, including the Departments of Buildings, Design and Construction, Transportation, Housing Preservation and Development, Health and Mental Hygiene.
The new protocols, he wrote in the memo, also include an Internet-based filing system for asbestos, which will automatically reject reports by any asbestos investigator whose certification has been suspended or revoked.
The agency, Mr. Holloway said in the memo, will nearly double the number of office audits it conducts each year, to 75, up from 40; the agency will check the records and activities of nearly 15 percent of the 543 asbestos investigators it certifies.
Also, the agency hired two additional inspection monitors in February, Mr. Sklerov said, bringing to 15 the number of staff members who, among other responsibilities, monitor asbestos investigators. In addition to the office audits, the monitors will conduct 500 spot-check field inspections each year to verify the accuracy of the information asbestos investigators provided about the planned scope of work and to check for any evidence of asbestos, the memo said.
Despite the changes detailed in the memo, however, experts and law enforcement officials said that many questions remained about the case of Mr. Todaro, including how he was able to get away with what he did for so long, and how the agency’s oversight practices had developed over the years.
Not the least of the questions center on the potential lingering effects of both Mr. Todaro’s crimes and of the city’s lapses in oversight.
Indeed, because Mr. Todaro falsified so many tests, it is impossible in most instances to determine if proper assessments would have revealed levels of asbestos that were potentially dangerous — not only to workers, but also to neighbors and passers-by — because the buildings have been torn down and replaced with new ones, or gutted and renovated.
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