Mayor Bloomberg’s visit to an unfinished Long Island City high-rise last week capped a series of upbeat announcements about how safe the city has become.
With crime and fire and motor-vehicle fatalities headed the right way, it was the Buildings Department’s turn to reveal its winning data.
“The great news keeps coming, this time in the arena of construction safety,” the mayor proclaimed alongside beaming elected officials and real-estate executives.
He added that construction injuries had plummeted 37 percent, from 241 in 2009 to 165 in 2010 to 152 last year.
“We’re now not only the best city in America but one of the safest, if not the safest,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney.
There’s just one problem: The mayor’s numbers from last Monday don’t match those on the city’s Web site.
Buildings officials now say that the higher figures, which can still be found under Citywide Performance Reporting (CPR) at nyc.gov, were a mistake and that Bloomberg’s lower ones were correct.
The Web site’s figures are in fiscal years and the mayor’s in calendar years, making quick comparisons difficult, but officials ’fessed up that something had gone terribly wrong.
“The CPR stats were generated from flawed DOB reports,” explained Buildings spokesman Tony Sclafani.
He added that the mayor’s figures came from inspectors’ reports and that the Web site captured more data fields than it should have, inflating the four-year injury total by 150 above the actual 706.
The errors weren’t minor. In fiscal 2010, 254 injuries were reported; that’s 48 more than the actual number. In fiscal 2011, the system posted 202; there were only 128, said Sclafani.
He said that the corrections would be made by Feb. 1 and that there was no evidence that any other Buildings Department data were inaccurate.
Whatever the explanation, the snafu is, at the least, deeply embarrassing. Bloomberg has touted his administration as one built on data backed up by transparency. So why didn’t anyone spot numbers that were wrong four years running?