Guide

Your construction superintendent was named personally on a summons

The company got four tickets and the super got one — with their own name, their own judgment, and their own registration on the line.

DOB inspectors summons construction superintendents and site-safety managers by name. What personal liability means for their registration and your job sites, and how to handle the hearing without burning your super.

When this applies
A summons lists your superintendent or site-safety manager as the respondent, or your super just told you one arrived.

How it's normally done — and how we make it easy

Step by step

1. 1

   Treat it as its own case

   A summons naming an individual runs on its own docket: its own hearing date, its own default clock, its own judgment. Resolving the company's tickets does nothing for the super's.

2. 2

   Check what duty is charged

   Superintendent summonses usually charge a failure to perform duties the Building Code assigns to the role — supervision, inspections, logs. The cure evidence is the super's own records: the log book, inspection entries, and corrective orders they issued.

3. 3

   Decide who appears

   The named respondent appears, or authorizes a representative in writing. The company can hire and pay that representative — most do — but the authorization must come from the person named.

4. 4

   Protect the registration

   Findings and unpaid judgments against a registered superintendent can surface in DOB's oversight of the registration itself. Clearing the personal docket protects the person and every project that depends on their filing.

5. 5

   Fix the site condition regardless

   The condition that drew the summons is usually also on the company's docket and the property's record. Correct it, document it, and certify where required — one fix, three ledgers.

Frequently asked

Can the company just pay the super's ticket?

Anyone can pay a balance. But a default or in-violation finding still lands on the super's record — appearing (or being represented) and contesting is usually worth more than quiet payment.

Our super left the company. Do we still care?

The judgment follows the person, but the violation may still sit on your project's record and figure in the property's sign-offs. Check what the summons attached to before closing the book.

Does a super's default count toward the company's $25,000 permit-block exposure?

The judgment is against the individual respondent. But inspectors write company and super tickets from the same visit, so where one defaulted the others usually did too — audit the whole visit's tickets together.