The Department of Buildings has posted a draft rule that rewrites the borough general hearing process for construction-related violations, and if you've ever sat in a BGH waiting room hoping your number gets called before lunch, this one's for you.
The draft, filed as an amendment to 1 RCNY 103-09, is sitting in DOB's own rulemaking docket right now, open for comment before it goes final. That means the version posted today is not settled law — it's DOB's proposal, and the comment window is where contractors and their attorneys actually get to push back on language that reads fine to a regulator and terrible to a guy trying to close out a scaffold permit.
Borough general hearings are where DOB adjudicates a big chunk of the tickets that don't rise to OATH-level drama: work-without-a-permit citations, facade violations, site-safety paperwork gaps. Right now the process runs on rules that predate a lot of DOB's current digital filing system, and contractors who've been through it know the friction points: unclear notice timelines, inconsistent adjournment standards, and paperwork that has to match exactly or gets kicked back.
We don't yet have DOB's section-by-section redline mapped against the current rule text — that's homework for anyone who books BGH dates regularly, and it's worth doing before the comment period closes, not after. If you or your compliance person appear in front of BGH more than once a quarter, this is a rule change worth reading in full rather than skimming.
So what's the move. Pull the actual draft off DOB's site, compare it line by line against the live version of 1 RCNY 103-09, and if a clause changes your notice window or your appeal rights, get a comment in before the docket closes. Rules that get written without contractor input tend to stay written that way for a decade.