Complaints accepted online

Two days after a scorching report tallied flaws in the way Clark County handles complaints about building safety, the county already has carried out a small but practical suggestion for improvement.

A so-called "hot button" for online complaints any time of day, made its debut Friday on the county Web page for development services, which is the department that houses the building division.

The online complaint form is on the county's home page, too.

The fire department, which also receives building complaints related to safety, plans to update its Web site to make online filing possible soon, county spokeswoman Stacey Welling said.

Consultant Michael Kessler's 96-page report prompted the Web site changes. Southern Nevada residents should be able to lodge complaints any time of day, "due to the fact that Las Vegas is a 24/365/7 city," the consultant wrote.

He noted that in the building division, the Web site did not, until Friday, provide information on how to file complaints. In the fire department, emergency dispatchers did not always pass along complaints that came in by phone after the department's inspection bureau had closed for the day.

But Kessler's audit also identified more intractable problems in the inspection process, which require more comprehensive fixes than a Web site redesign.

He found, for example, numerous incidents of preferential treatment of certain projects by inspectors, inadequate record keeping, falsified reports and what appears to be a lax attitude of many employees toward the safety ramifications of their work.

Several flagrant incidents Kessler recommended referring to law enforcement for criminal investigation. One of those entailed covert remodeling, several floors at a time, of guest rooms at the Rio from late 2004 to early 2006.

A complaint filed with the building division in summer 2006 about a lack of permits went unheeded for six months, then resulted in a superficial visit to the hotel by a supervising inspector, who closed the complaint file the same day as unfounded. In autumn, media began covering the situation; the county reopened its closed file, and found major work done without permits or inspection. County commissioners, in early November, hired Kessler to plumb the depths of the problem.

Other steps that Kessler recommended to Clark County include overhauls of inspector training, technical and ethical, as well as reporting methods and record-keeping systems.

On Friday, Kessler said he had confidence the county manager and her staff will "take the necessary actions to safeguard the community" by rectifying the problems he identified.

Fred Frazzetta, a nonunion electrician who had worked on the hotel remodel, filed the Rio complaint. The consultant applauded Frazzetta for "valor -- he recognized that things weren't being done right, and as a matter of simple principle he felt he could not let it continue."

Frazzetta, however, on Thursday stopped short of congratulating himself, Kessler or the county. He will not be satisfied, he said, until hotels and safety officials that endangered the public's safety are held accountable.

Ron Lynn, the county's director of Development Services, which houses the building division, declined to be interviewed Friday, citing his heavy workload, as he finishes proposals that he and staff have been working since autumn to improve the same problem areas Kessler covered.

One proposed new program, which Lynn views as setting a national precedent, would inspect all guest rooms in local hotels over a five-year cycle, instead of waiting for complaints to trigger inspections.

Contact reporter Joan Whitely at jwhitely@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0268.