Sophia Vailakis-DeVirgilio and her husband, Lenny
West 12th Road, Broad Channel
So the good news is, that after my emailing last week, the articles published on this blog, my tweet barrage, FB posts, giving a package of emails and related communication (including print outs of varying articles) on Sunday (the 5th Anniversary of Sandy) to our newly minted Assembly person’s advance people, and after we got our plans approved on Friday October 27th, our final building permit was issued yesterday October 31st. The meeting with the Chief Plan Examiner of DOB Special Enforcement Team, our engineer and I was quick and painless, which made me think we had unknowingly slipped into an alternate universe. It would seem that at this point our greatest hurdles have been surmounted, but let’s be honest, tigers don’t change their stripes. We hope not get any more surprises, but we’d be fools to think the war is over.
Credit needs to be given where credit is due, to lots of prayer (God is still on the Thrown!), and my dogged refusal to give up, with the help of this blog – are the likely reasons why I think we got where we are now. There were far too many other people who decided that this was not a fight they wanted to stay in, for many good reasons (look at how we got trounced and for how long). This is likely why so many people who started in the CYOC (Choose Your Own Contractor) pathway allowed BIB to push them into another pathway with other contractors, buyouts or to leave the Build It Back program all together without getting any help. This should not have been so hard for us or anyone else and it continues to beg the question of why there was so little support for CYOC and why so many people who did drop out seemed to have been driven to do so. If for nothing else than to highlight the lack of compassion in a program that was supposed to help people who were already traumatized by an unprecedented natural disaster. The barrage of assaults from BIB losing paperwork, contractor fraud (and other issues like contractor unresponsiveness and delays), technocratic bureaucracy by city agencies, this program has been crushing and retraumatizing. I have yet to meet one person who has not had some, most or all of the experiences I've described. Never mind me, for all of the people who did not have the resources I dug up, they should get answers.
As I think about if we had gone into another contractor pathway or acquisition, the final insult would have been Build It Back asking for us to pay back what we’d spent from our insurance settlement during our trip down the CYOC rabbit hole… I mean pathway…, in the form of a transfer amount for what they would have said was a duplication of benefits (DOB). I’m seeing people in other Sandy grant programs like New York Rising on Long Island and the RREM program in New Jersey getting letters from governmental agencies clawing back tens of thousands of dollars. And as special as I think my family and I are, we are no exception – I have little doubt that the same thing would have happened to us.
A dear friend told me that you can have your house, or you can be right, but you can’t have both. I hope my determination to always fight City Hall when they are wrong ends with our house being built and the issuance of a C of O (Certificate of Occupancy) by the NYC Department of Buildings, but again, I’m no fool. This battle may be over, but the war may still be raging. The fact that a letter sent by my husband to the mayor of NYC that was a plea for help could ever have been classified as a complaint ("App_004702_Virgilio Leonard_Mayoral Complaint_08162017"), lets me know that we have to stay vigilant. And then there’s the fact that since Friday, my email messages to the Department of Buildings keep getting bounced back where it looks like my email and/or IP address is being blacklisted as that of a spammer:
talk to me: 554-vwall5.nyc.gov 554 Your access to this mail system has been
rejected due to the sending MTA's poor reputation. If you believe that this
failure is in error, please contact the intended recipient via alternate means.
Intestinal fortitude comes at a price that our family and I have paid, dearly.
In case you’re interested to know who are the wonderful people who’ve manufactured and patiently waited 3 and a half years to ship our log house kit, they are eLogHomes.com and they’re great folks.
Kindest Regards,
Sophia Vailakis-DeVirgilio
West 12th Road, Broad Channel
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