Opinion

Can NYC inspect real dangers?

Mayor Bloomberg claims the Health Department has made great strides protecting public health with its restaurant-inspection blitz, citing a minuscule decline in salmonella cases.

But if his DOH cheerleading is really about safety, rather than about the $25 million more collected in fines for violations since 2006, why does the agency have so ridiculously many more inspectors relative to the number of sites it covers than the Department of Buildings — which monitors locations that truly are dangerous?

By my calculations from agency data, the DOH has one inspector for every 160 restaurants. The DOB, according to its annual report, has one inspector for every 3,075 properties it’s supposed to monitor.

That means there are 19 times more inspectors for restaurants than there are for buildings on a per-site basis.

(Yes, the DOH squad also looks at senior centers and the like, but DOB staff have other duties, too; the numbers still tell us plenty about each agency’s resources for main function.)

That woeful understaffing sheds new light on the DOB’s 28 percent reduction in the average number of monthly elevator inspections since 2008, reported this week by Post City Hall Bureau Chief David Seifman.

That dropoff looks dreadful in the wake of the recent horrific death of an advertising executive in an out-of-control Midtown lift. But the DOB claims that fewer elevator inspections don’t mean greater risk, because accidents fell from 53 in 2010 to 43 last year.

Be that as it may, the most fundamental reading of the situation is that the DOB is simply overwhelmed by its workload.

The structural imbalance in inspection resources between DOH and DOB is an elephant in the room that’s rarely addressed — probably because it was the case long before Bloomberg’s cooking-temperature crackdown.

But it’s even more of an outrage now that the DOH is treating eatery owners like criminals, while the DOB has nothing like the manpower to keep tabs on a city that can seem like one vast construction site.

How out of whack are City Hall’s priorities?

The DOH has 150 inspectors to cover 24,000 restaurants, 95 of them assigned to eateries full time, the rest “available as needed,” an agency spokesman told me. The rep stated this constituted a heavy work load for them.

But the DOB deploys 317 inspectors to monitor 975,000 “buildings and properties,” according to its annual report. Those 317 are supposed to monitor existing structures for code compliance, projects under construction, scaffolding — and 60,000 elevators.

What too often happens at the sites nominally monitored by the DOB?

Construction workers die in accidents on the job — five last year (which the city lauded as a 73 percent improvement over the death toll in 2008). In one incident last November, a building going up in Brighton Beach crumbled, killing one man and injuring several others; the owners had ignored a DOB stop-work order.

Scaffolds and sidewalk bridges collapse, like the one that fell on a bus in Harlem last September, injuring 17.

Heavy loads fall from cranes, as happened at 4 World Trade Center last month when steel beams plummeted 40 stories; fortunately, no one was hurt.

Cranes themselves give way — most infamously, the ones that killed two people at East 91st Street and seven people at East 51st Street in 2008.

Meanwhile, how much risk do restaurants pose to the average New Yorker?

The DOH crows that since it began letter-grading 18 months ago, salmonella cases are down 14 percent. Big deal: That’s from an average of just over 15 per year per 100,000 New Yorkers in 2007-2010 to 13.7 cases last year, or one fewer case per about 70,000 people. And DOH can’t even show that restaurants had anything to do with those handful of infections.

When it pretends that droppings of mice on floors pose a greater threat than brick and mortar that fall on human beings, City Hall’s priorities are seriously warped.