Brooklyn Contractor Fined $10,000 for Defying DOB Stop-Work Order

Kedar Elite Construction kept building a three-story house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn eighteen days after New York City’s Department of Buildings ordered the site to stop, and on September 21 the city’s Environmental Control Board fined the contractor $10,000 for it, one of three stop-work defiance citations DOB issued across Brooklyn and Queens within a single week.

Why it matters

DOB records show the stop-work order at 69 Dover Street was issued September 3 and barred all exterior work at every elevation except scaffold maintenance. Inspectors who returned September 21 found brickwork rising past 20 feet at the building’s rear elevation, work the order specifically prohibited. The job itself is a new one-family home, 9,603 square feet across three stories with a proposed height of 35 feet, filed under owner Igor Korogodskiy and permitted this past December. For a builder anywhere in the city, the record is a reminder that DOB does not treat a stop-work order as a pause the crew can quietly work around: the same code section, unlawfully continuing work while on notice of a stop-work order, is what the city used the following day against two more respondents. Nisanov Shlomo and the congregation Kehilat Sephardim Of Ahav were each cited $25,000 in Queens on September 22 for continuing work under a separate stop-work order at 150-58 and 150-60 78th Road, a case this outlet has already reported in full. Three citations in two days, tied to two unrelated orders, is not routine enforcement volume.

The numbers

The $10,000 penalty against Kedar Elite Construction carries a balance due of $10,000, unpaid as of the ECB record, with a hearing calendared for December 2. That penalty is a Class 1 violation, the same severity tier DOB applied to both Queens citations the next day, where the fines were $25,000 apiece rather than $10,000. Combined, the three defiance citations issued September 21 and 22 total $60,000 in penalties across two active stop-work orders in two boroughs, all still pending hearing.

What’s next

The Dover Street stop-work order remains active and the ECB violation remains pending, with the December 2 hearing set to determine whether the $10,000 fine stands and whether DOB escalates further if inspectors find continued work before then. Nothing in the DOB NOW job filing record indicates the order has been lifted. For builders working under an active stop-work order anywhere in New York, the same lesson applies across all three of this week’s cases: the penalty resets each time an inspector finds the crew back on site, not each time new construction appears.