Robert Mordecai, a Village of Great Neck building inspector, defended his credentials on Tuesday and responded to criticism from several residents at a previous public meeting.
Several village residents criticized Mordecai and certain members of the village’s Building Department and accused them of not having a full understanding of village code and of a lack of enforcement during a Board of Trustees meeting on Dec. 1.
Longtime village resident Jean Pierce was blunt in saying that Mordecai should be replaced immediately. Pierce said, in her experiences with him, Mordecai had shown “incompetence and threatening behavior.”
“You need to hire a good, knowledgeable inspector who knows the code and will not turn a blind eye to construction errors,” Pierce said during the Dec. 1 meeting. “He really needs to be replaced, period.”
“I don’t even understand what the argument is,” Mordecai said during a board meeting on Tuesday night. “She’s claiming that I don’t know the codes? Which codes is she talking about?”
He said the work at issue had followed village code and had been approved by the Building Department.
Pierce said Mordecai’s alleged lack of knowledge of the village code led to “devastating results” on driveway construction done for the residence at 46 Arrandale Ave. Pierce said construction on the driveway, which is connected with Pierce’s at 44 Arrandale, began over the summer, with neighbors wanting to pave over some of their backyard to create space for more cars.
Mordecai said the situation was “extremely simple” and said the property line between 44 and 46 Arrandale Ave. is in the middle of the driveway, something he said was “very rare” in the Village of Great Neck. Mordecai said in older houses throughout the village, rain water in driveways is grandfathered to run into the streets. However, he said, water running into the neighbor’s backyard is not grandfathered.
Mordecai said he tested the neighbor’s paved construction, which is pitched further away from Pierce’s house than it was prior to the construction, and pitched into the neighbor’s backyard.
Pierce said she expressed concerns to Mordecai regarding the project and future rainfall, but said village officials told her that the driveway would be pitched west so water would run off that way. Now, Pierce said, every time a warning for excessive rainfall arises, she and her husband prepare to wear their rain boots to trek out to their cars while navigating through excessive puddles.
“[Mordecai] got nasty about it and said that [the excessive rainfall] was my fault,” Pierce said. “I told him that it was certainly not my fault. [He] saw the site, saw the amount of work that was going to be done, and signed off on it. It has nothing to do with us.”
Mordecai also said in the shared driveway there is an oval-shaped area roughly three feet long and six feet wide and about an inch-and-a-half deep.
“When [Pierce] is claiming that she is going to drown, nobody can drown in an inch-and-a-half at its deepest point,” Mordecai said. “All it takes is a few bags of blacktop to patch it so the water runs into the street.”
Mordecai said there is also an indentation where the shared driveway turns into a “Y” shape and veers off into respective driveways for 44 and 46 Arrandale.
Village of Great Neck Mayor Pedram Bral told Superintendent of Buildings Stephen Haramis and possibly Mordecai to see if there is a way to remedy the situation for Pierce.
“Obviously I’m sure there are ways of fixing it,” Bral said. “And also be available for questions so the message can be sent out clearly. This was all done according to the code and was deemed acceptable by the Building Department.”
Mordecai confirmed that the project was done according to village code and approved by the department.
