Lawyers: 'It's Impossible to Get Anything Done' With New Building Department

Since the former building department was dissolved in the wake of a criminal investigation and placed under the authority of code enforcement, residents and elected officials have lauded inspectors and their efforts to corrupt decades of alleged fraud.

But the new dedication to following the law to the letter doesn't sit well with one group: local lawyers.

Building staff don't return phone calls quickly enough, freedom of information requests can take months, and would-be buyers are running afoul of loan timelines, accumulating fines because of the building department bottleneck, according to Anthony Gioffre.

Gioffre is president of the Port Chester/Rye Bar Association, and said he was speaking on behalf of about 50 local lawyers when he spoke at Tuesday night's board meeting.

The delays impact lawyers and their "livelihood," Gioffre said, as well as buyers who become frustrated with delays and fines.

"Brokers are telling prospective residents, 'You know what? Go to a different community,'" Gioffre told trustees. "Quite frankly, that's a very sad state of affairs."

Gioffre said lawyers aren't happy with the pace of operations and with the fact that some employees are part-time. That makes it difficult to schedule meetings and ask questions of building department staff, he said.

But Port Chester's trustees weren't in a mood to apologize.

After visiting the building department and viewing the files for himself recently, Trustee Sam Terenzi declared the village "ass backwards" and said the scope of the alleged fraud was far wider than Port Chester's leaders previously realized.

On Tuesday, Terenzi carefully avoided outright accusations, while noting that the local law community didn't raise any flags during the decades when officials played paperwork sleight-of-hand and two-family homes were magically transformed into more pricey, five-family units in the village.

"Every piece of paper that was in those files, somewhere an attorney signed off on that paperwork," Terenzi said. Although he said he was not accusing lawyers of being complicit, Terenzi noted that "for the last 40 years, they all knew that if you came to Port Chester and you knew the right people, anything could happen."

Mayor Dennis Pilla told Gioffre village officials would have "offline" discussions with the local bar to smooth things over. Check back with Port Chester Patch for updates.

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