Higher profile for safety

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

The state agency that investigates safety on the job released a report Monday showing that it did not waver from its original findings after the Jan. 14 death of a worker, 58-year-old Michael Taylor, at the construction site of the Cosmopolitan on the Strip.

It also did not dismiss or water down its findings in the Nov. 27 death of construction worker David Rabun, 30, also at the Cosmopolitan site.

These cases represent a significant departure from recent practices of the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration. An ongoing series of stories by Las Vegas Sun reporter Alexandra Berzon has documented a disturbing pattern by Nevada OSHA in response to fatal Strip construction accidents, of which there have been nine since the end of 2006.

Nevada OSHA, after standard post-accident conferences with the companies it had cited for safety violations, would often withdraw the citations or reduce their penalties.

The post-accident conferences concerning the deaths of Taylor and Rabun, however, were held after Berzon began making inquiries in February. Now, it would seem, Nevada OSHA is taking safety enforcement more seriously.

In the case of the conference concerning Taylor’s death, the subcontractor that had been cited argued that it wasn’t at fault. Nevertheless, Nevada OSHA neither withdrew the citations nor reduced the assessed fines. This same scenario, although involving another subcontractor, occurred in the conference about Rabun’s death.

Both subcontractors are appealing their cases to a review board, which is the normal route in accidents involving deaths. OSHA officials at the federal level have told Berzon that only rarely should state agencies reduce or withdraw their citations during conferences about fatal accidents.

Contractors receiving citations will almost always contest them, as their safety records are examined whenever they bid on jobs. But the facts are what should be speaking the loudest to Nevada OSHA, not contractors with an obvious interest in maintaining clean records.