Mayor Bloomberg this week said that getting Albany to pass gay mar riage is the city’s “No. 1 priority.”
Gee, where does he rank getting the mob out of the Buildings Deparment?
Clearly, the agency needs urgent attention: Six former city buildings inspectors, including three associates of the Lucchese crime family, were nabbed Thursday on bribery charges, following a two-year probe by the Manhattan DA.
Sure, organized crime — or bribery — in the construction biz isn’t exactly new. But typically, the inspectors themselves aren’t bona fide mobsters, right?
How did these people get jobs?
One of the alleged Lucchese associates, Carmine Francomano Jr., even managed to reach the rank of supervisor.
The Buildings Department has long been a source of embarrassment for Bloomberg — from its neglect of the toxic former Deutsche Bank building to its failure to prevent two crane collapses last year.
Yet after each “shake-up,” new problems, and indictments, seem to pop up.
The department now says it’ll probe the inspectors’ hiring to see if it needs to further toughen its vetting standards, and points to recent reforms on that front.
But plainly, much more needs doing.
Could it be that the mayor’s long-documented devotion to trendy social causes has distracted him from the nuts and bolts of municipal governance?
Let’s hope not: The Buildings Department, for one, clearly needs sustained attention.
Kudos, by the way, to DA Robert Morgenthau and his folks — who’ve been vigilant in rooting out agency corruption.
But making sure there’s less for the DA to find should be the mayor’s top priority.