One day after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters that he doesn’t “think anybody should be fully satisfied with the Department of Buildings,” the Buldings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster, an architect who Bloomberg appointed to the position, resigned. Her departure from the office comes at time when the city has already seen 13 construction-related deaths in 2008, one more fatality than all of 2007.

Many of the deaths have involved high profile incidents. On March 15th of this year, a crane collapse on the east side of Manhattan killed seven people. Last week, Lancaster admitted that building plans where crane collapsed, injuring an additional 24 people, should never have been approved Buildings Department spokesperson Kate Lindquist said that the error was actually discovered before the crane collapse but that the department did not issue a stop-work order.

Other construction-related deaths in the news this year include the death of Yuriy Vanchytskyy, who fell 42 stories at the Trump Soho when the wooden mold for the concrete he was pouring collapsed. DiFama Concrete, a contractor involved in the construction, had numerous violations and thousands of dollars in penalties for other sites throughout Manhattan.

Just last week, Kevin Kelley fell 9 stories to his death while installing windows at The Laurel, a luxury development on the Upper East Side. By the time of Kelley’s death, the site had already received 25 construction violations, many of which were Class A, the most dangerous offences.

Lancaster has defended her six years as Buildings Commissioner, saying that the department was corrupted and in shambles when Rudolph Guiliani left the mayor’s office at the end of 2001. Since arriving at the department, Lancaster has put public records on the Internet, tried to clear out the corruption—which had begin to overwhelm the plumbing inspector’s office—and increased penalties.

In a statement released by Lancaster, she stated that “It has been an honor serving in [Mayor Bloomberg’s] administration and I thank the Mayor for this opportunity. After six years in public service, I made this decision because I felt it was time to return to the private sector.”

 -Jonathan Mason