By Yifei K. Tan

The City Council and the Department of Building (DOB) officials discussed at City Hall yesterday 12 bills proposed to address construction site safety in the wake of many recent fatal accidents.

Even as they spoke and unknown to them, a construction worker was plunging to his death from a scaffold on the Triborough Bridge in Queens. The victim was not immediately identified.

At the hearing, Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn said the recent accidents “serve as painful reminders of how dangerous it is to work in this industry,” and she, with other officials wanted to make job sites safer for the workers and the neighbors.

“As far as my staff and I are concerned, construction safety must always be the Department’s highest priority,” DOB’s new Acting Commissioner Robert LiMandri said.

Among other measures, Housing and Buildings Committee members urged the department to deny permits to developers who have repeatedly violated the city’s building codes and zoning laws and to make it unlawful for an individual to use any supported scaffold without a user certificate.

The bills also introduced ideas of providing training and introductions on interpretations and applications of the zoning resolution, building codes, electrical codes and other laws to all inspectors.

In addition, the Department professionals who participate in the professional certification program should carry professional liability insurance.

Some officials proposed a bill encouraging appointment of an accountable independent monitor to sites with more than three hazardous or major violations within any six-month period and the monitor will stay at the site until the Department is satisfied that there is no need for the monitor to be there any longer or until the construction activities are concluded. Creations of hotlines for employees to report any unsafe conditions at the site, as well as the creation of multilingual signs and manuals of languages spoken most often at the site for workers were also proposed.

Representatives of local real estate groups and construction unions suggested even stronger measures, such as replacing the DOB with a public corporation that would act more decisively than the lumbering and embattled city bureaucracy.

“The Buildings Department is collapsing under the weight of its own reform,” said Louis J. Coletti, a spokesman for the real estate industry.

LiMandri opposed creating a hotline. He said that the operators for 311 were trained to quickly route construction violations to DOB specialists.

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer testified that 13 lives have been lost as the result of construction accidents here and in 2007, injuries on construction sites occurred at the rate of almost one per day.

“To fix this problem, government agencies beyond DOB, labor leaders, developers, local residents, and Washington, D.C., must all be part of the solution,” he said.