Emails: City Hall fast-tracked Hudson Yards inspections, forcing FDNY to cancel on schools, housing

A City Hall order to fast-track fire safety inspections at a high-end Hudson Yards office tower forced officials to cancel reviews scheduled months earlier at two schools, multiple apartment buildings and a Baruch College facility, according to internal emails obtained by Gothamist.

After all that, the building at 50 Hudson Yards failed its review anyway, additional emails show.

In response, high-ranking officials told fire inspectors to return and cancel even more appointments for people and projects that had been awaiting inspections for months.

“If they could’ve kept their original dates, we would not have to cancel 25-30 jobs,” Deputy Chief Brian Cordasco wrote to colleagues and officials on May 11, 2022.

But fire officials’ hands were tied by a directive handed down as “a top priority from City Hall,” a deputy fire chief wrote in an earlier email reported by Gothamist, one of a trove of documents revealing how initiatives meant to prioritize small businesses, schools, shelters and affordable housing morphed into a tool for catering to the city’s wealthiest, most well-connected real estate developers. The accusations first emerged earlier this year in a lawsuit filed by fire chiefs who say they were sidelined after speaking out about the VIP treatment.

Gothamist obtained the emails as the Adams administration faces scrutiny for allowing big developers and corporations to bypass the fire safety inspection backlog. A document circulated among City Hall and FDNY officials spelled out exactly who got to jump the line, and has emerged as part of a federal probe into Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign fundraising tactics.

Neither Adams nor his campaign staff have been accused of wrongdoing related to that federal investigation.

Adams and his spokespeople have repeatedly denied that a list of fast-tracked buildings exists — despite confirmation from Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh.

“Every New Yorker that comes to me is serviced,” Adams told reporters last month. “Whoever calls us, whoever seeks assistance, we help them.”

Neither City Hall nor the FDNY provided responses to questions for this story.

But emails and documents reveal how the roster of priority projects — at times referred to as the Deputy Mayor of Operations, or DMO, list — was being used well into Adams’ time in office, often to grease the wheels for wealthy developers, top donors and companies with access to high-ranking city officials.

‘Extremely unfair’

That was the case when it came to the 50 Hudson Yards office complex, which is owned by the Related Companies and leased by tenants like the investment firm BlackRock and Facebook parent company Meta.

The building was initially scheduled for a March 2022 inspection, which was canceled because the fire safety system wasn’t ready for review, emails show. FDNY inspectors rescheduled the two-week inspection process for May. But that wasn’t soon enough for City Hall, which handed down the order to usher the project to the front of the line, according to an April 8, 2022 email reviewed by Gothamist.

After receiving the directive, Fire Prevention Bureau field inspector Rocco Bonavita shared a list of 14 scheduled inspections across 12 addresses that the department’s customer service center would have to cancel on April 11, 2022. He added a note saying the Office of the Fire Commissioner would smooth things over with the people pushed aside.

The addresses of the canceled inspections include the location of a public school building in Bensonhurst and a private school with a sliding-scale tuition system in Fort Greene called Brooklyn Independent Middle School.

Administrators at Brooklyn Independent did not respond to a message asking about the cancellation. The city’s Department of Education did not respond to an email seeking comment.

FDNY officials also canceled inspections at the addresses of three small multifamily apartment buildings in Sunset Park, a 35-unit condo building in the West Village known as 90 Morton St., a Williamsburg apartment building with 19 income-restricted units and a Baruchf College building that contains the Mishkin Gallery and Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, the emails show.

They were also set to inspect the SoHo office building containing the “Bravo Clubhouse,” where executive Andy Cohen hosts his nightly program “Watch What Happens Live,” and where the hosts of Men in Blazers record their popular soccer podcast.

Baruch, the brokerage firm advertising units at 90 Morton and the companies that own the buildings in Williamsburg and SoHo did not respond to requests for comment.

The Sunset Park building owners likewise did not respond to phone messages.

Safety inspection delays hamper project openings throughout the city, lengthening moves into new housing or costing owners money as they wait to finally start doing business.

The problem deepened during the pandemic. Fire prevention inspectors completed about 28,000 reviews in the year 2021 fiscal year, compared to about 47,000 in the 2019 fiscal year, according to an annual Mayor’s Management Report on city agency performance. The number increased to around 33,000 last fiscal year and city officials say they have managed to knock about four weeks off last year’s 18-week average wait time.

But the idea of canceling appointments made months in advance did not sit well with staff in the FDNY’s fire prevention bureau.

In an April 7, 2022 email first reported by The City, Cordasco called the order to expedite Hudson Yards “extremely unfair to the applicants who had been waiting at least eight weeks for their inspections.”

“Industry opposition will include questions as to why certain projects are advanced while others need to be canceled and pushed back?” he wrote, adding that slots typically open up because an applicant cancels, not because the FDNY flakes out.

“For example, 50 HY canceled their scheduled inspections in March 2022 because they were not ready,” Cordasco said in the email.

That led high-ranking City Hall officials to again demand expedited reviews in May.

A version of the prioritized buildings list from that month includes a column labeled “source” to show who requested the fast-tracking for multiple projects.

The “source” for 50 Hudson Yards is noted as Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, with the name of an aide also included in parentheses, and Dermot Shea, the former police commissioner now serving as president of Related Commercial Management Company. Other sites on the list note the “source” as a variety of elected officials, city agencies and lobbyists with close ties to government.

That second directive elicited another frustrated response from fire officials.

“I recommended we do not drop everything like last time, cancel a bunch of jobs, and try to do this week,” Cordasco wrote to Bonavita and Assistant Chief Kevin Brennan on May 9, 2022.

The project again appeared on the priority list in June, Gothamist first reported.

And the office tower finally opened in October 2022, with Adams praising the project in a company press release and celebrating with the building owners.

“With some of the biggest investors in the world leasing space in this building, these business leaders are sending a clear message that they have confidence in the future of our city and want to expand their footprint in the greatest city in the world,” he said.

Related did not respond to an email seeking comment.

City lobbying records show Related was paying the lobbying firm Kasirer to press City Hall on building approvals and twice targeted top officials in the mayor’s office, including then-chief of staff Frank Carone and Deputy Mayor of Operations Meera Joshi.

The firm has deep ties to city government. Related is working with another developer on a proposal to tear down two public housing complexes in Chelsea and replace them with a new mixed-income development. The company also contributed to an $8 million fund intended to move street homeless New Yorkers out of public spaces, one of Adams’ signature goals.

And Related's Chair Stephen Ross has spent more than $1 million to prop up moderate or right-leaning candidates for city office in recent years.

‘Opening of a Pandora’s box’

The batch of emails show how the list of priority projects morphed from a tool for expediting public sector projects and small businesses to a list favoring the city’s biggest developers — such as Related, Durst and Vornado — along with big-name brands like Facebook and the Ritz Carlton.

An early version of the “DMO list” from October 2021, before Adams took office, includes more than 30 projects prioritized for fire safety inspections. The document includes at least 13 schools and daycares, eight public housing complexes, two homeless shelters, a juvenile detention center, a Bronx hospital facility, the Bronx Children’s Museum, and an affordable housing complex in Jamaica.

In an Oct. 27, 2021 email, FDNY Intergovernmental Coordinator Madelyn Adams suggested the list should focus on public accommodations.

“City Hall has not yet given a ranking priority so, unless you think otherwise, I think the general priority should be 1. Schools; 2. Homeless Shelters; 3. Affordable Housing; 4. Everything Else,” Madelyn Adams said in the email.

She did not respond to a message seeking comment.

But by January 2022, when Adams took office, the list was being used to speed up a variety of projects, with officials in the Fire Prevention Bureau discussing the pitfalls of fast-tracking buildings that weren’t ready for inspection.

“Before pulling the trigger, let’s ensure applicants have done their due diligence,” Fire Prevention Bureau Chief Joseph Jardin wrote to colleagues in a Jan. 26, 2022 email with the subject “Six Expedited FARequests” — a reference to fire alarm tests. “We can’t readily permit this to be the opening of a Pandora’s box and start of a bad trend!”

Several new projects were added to the “DMO list” on Jan. 21, 2022, according to a list included in an email attachment. A minigolf-themed bar called Swingers Restaurant, located inside the newly constructed Virgin Hotel in Midtown, topped the list. The spreadsheet lists the “source” of the restaurant’s inclusion on the list as George Fontas, an influential consultant and lobbyist.

In February 2022, Jardin again questioned why the list was being used to expedite projects like the Facebook offices — reflecting statements he made in a lawsuit against Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh after his demotion earlier this year.

Jardin, Brennan, Bonavita and Cordasco did not respond to emails seeking comment for this story.

In a series of March emails, the officials once more discussed the problems with the “priority list.”

“All these requests on this list cannot come before ‘everyone else,’” Brennan, an assistant chief, said on March 8, 2022. “Its [sic] bad customer service to the public at large who for the most part do not have the influence to move their project along.”

This story was updated to reflect the process for adding a project to the priority list