Mayor Bill de Blasio meets with New Yorkers who suffered property damage from the flooding due to Ida. Image Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.
The waiver of fees relieves an additional burden for property owners already dealing with storm damage. On September 7, 2021, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed Emergency Executive Order 235, which allows the Department of Buildings and Department of Environmental Protection to waive fees associated with various permits or applications that will be needed by property owners for storm damage repair.
The Emergency Executive Order recognizes that as part of the recovery after Ida, property owners will require permits, document filings, inspections and applications associated with the repair work. In order to assist property owners, the Department of Environmental Protection can now waive fees associated with asbestos abatement and waive the seven day advance submittal requirement. The Department of Buildings can waive fees relating to electrical permits, construction document filing fees, permit filing fees, and special fees. Applications and permits for alteration work, demolition work, new building work, electrical, plumbing, associated work permits and inspections, and asbestos abatement will be eligible for fee waivers if the applicant submits a certification that the requested work is due to storm damage.
The Emergency Order retroactively dated the fee waivers back to September 1, 2021.
Additionally, on September 8, 2021, Mayor de Blasio announced that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development would not be issuing fines for illegal basement apartments for the rest of the year as a means to ensure people can go back to those apartments and have a place to live.
Mayor de Blasio stated, “Some of the homeowners yesterday, and they were very honest about having tenants in apartments that were not fully up to code, those basement apartments we’ve been talking so much about . . . those unfortunately illegal basement apartments in the areas affected most deeply by Hurricane Ida. We will not be issuing fines for the rest of the year. Our goal is to make sure that folks can get back to those apartments, that they can be made whole, that people have a place to live. We’ve got a lot of work to do on the basement issue. It is a very, very difficult one, but right now we don’t want to put homeowners in a double jeopardy, they’ve just been through a horrible storm. We don’t want to hit them with additional fines. We don’t want to have a situation where someone who was living in a basement apartment has nowhere to live. We got to get people whole right now, get them to where they were before the storm, and then work to address the bigger problem.”
By: Veronica Rose (Veronica is the CityLaw fellow and a New York Law School graduate, Class of 2018.)