Written by Chip Nyborg, President of Tri-State Elevator, July 2nd, 2018
“A greedy person and a pauper are practically one and the same.” - Swiss Proverb
Cease Use Violation
As a result of the NYS Comptroller’s report of NYC Elevator inspections I suspect the violations and cease use violations are going to increase. Just yesterday a client had their only elevator shut down by a PVT inspector and tagged out of service for a non-functioning door restrictor. We received notice at 4:30pm and sent one of our technicians, who also is a licensed elevator inspector to check it out. Our technician upon turning power back on to check the condition found the restrictor working! He operated the restrictor many times and never had a failure. Our history of this particular elevator shows the restrictor to be functioning on a reliable basis. So, we had to leave the elevator shut down and wait until the next day, send another tech. (who is also a NYC licensed inspector) to meet an inspector so the cease use could be lifted.
Shockingly, 3 out 4 violation conditions cited were 100% inaccurate on this PVT violation. Is this incompetency? Is this due to a lack of training? Is this a matter of meeting a quota? Is this about writing as many PVT violations in a day as possible? I believe the elevator inspectors that write the PVT violations are paid by the violation. I thought the pay was $45.00 per violation. So, an eager inspector could run around writing 10-12 + violations a day without too much concern of the accuracy of the violation. Unless there is a maximum # of violations permitted to be written in a day, why not maximize your time and write as many as possible? If there is a cap to the number of violations written, then why not rush to do as many as possible in as short amount of time as possible and take ½ the day off? Hmmmm, this could be an issue.
What I want to know is, how do I fight this? Do we fight this? Is it worth it to fight? To me it is a matter of principle. Most of the violations our clients receive are accurate. What happened in this building, this time?
Incompetency or greed?