Michigan Spent $20.8 Million on Elevator and Boiler Safety. Auditors Still Found 84% of Flagged Boiler Violations Never Rechecked.

A boiler inspector finds a violation — a cracked weld, a dead safety valve, a control that won't shut the burner off — and orders a follow-up inspection to confirm it got fixed.▸ In Michigan, that follow-up now happens 16% of the time. The other 84% of flagged boilers just keep running, per the Michigan Office of the Auditor General's November 2024 follow-up report on the Bureau of Construction Codes (BCC) — the LARA agency that regulates every elevator, escalator, and boiler in the state outside Detroit. That's not a new problem. It's the same one auditors documented three years earlier, after the agency had already spent more and hired more to fix it.

The Auditor General's October 2021 performance audit covered roughly 20 months, October 2018 through May 2020, and found BCC badly behind on the two device types with the clearest safety stakes.▸ Auditors traced the shortfall to staffing: "approximately 40% of its 27 to 29 elevator inspector positions" sat vacant through the audit period. With that gap, BCC had not completed 7,860 of 61,900 required routine boiler inspections (13%) and had missed 2,217 of 2,308 required follow-up inspections on boilers with known violations — 96%. In a 40-device sample of elevators, escalators, and lifts, 29 (72.5%) had an outstanding overdue inspection, some by more than five years.

LARA did not dispute any of it, and in the years after, the numbers that were within the agency's control to move — money and headcount — moved.▸ BCC's total spending rose from $17.8 million in fiscal year 2019 to $20.8 million in fiscal year 2023, and its workforce grew from 111 employees (April 2021) to 137 (December 2023), per the Auditor General's own agency-description figures in both reports. In its written response to the 2024 follow-up, LARA said it had increased staffing in the elevator safety program by "almost 50%" since 2021 and in the boiler program by 25% since 2022 — even as the volume of boilers requiring a routine inspection grew 8%, from 61,900 to 66,795.

The extra money and staff did buy some ground.▸ Boiler routine inspections improved from 13% overdue to 9% overdue — a real gain, given the growing workload. The 40-device elevator sample improved from 72.5% overdue to 50% overdue. LARA told auditors its corrective actions had produced "over 2,000 fewer devices with an overdue inspection" and "almost 1,900 fewer overdue routine [boiler] inspections."

None of that was enough.▸ The Auditor General's own conclusion on both findings, unchanged from 2021: "Did not comply. A material condition still exists." The clearest measure of that is the number that barely moved at all — the follow-up inspections that confirm a documented violation was actually fixed. On boilers, that rate went from 96% overdue in 2021 to 84% overdue in 2024, a 12-percentage-point improvement LARA points to as progress. It also means that as of May 15, 2024, of 3,159 boilers a BCC inspector had personally flagged as having a safety violation, 2,642 were still running without anyone confirming the fix.

The high-risk cases fare no better on the elevator side.▸ Auditors sampled 17 high-risk elevating-device violations — the kind serious enough to potentially pull a device out of service — and found 10 (59%) still had an overdue follow-up inspection, averaging 172 days late, as of April 1, 2024.

Money and staffing at BCC overall grew.▸ Two of its smaller programs didn't get the same treatment, because their funding is fixed by a statute nobody has revisited since the Ford administration. Carnival- amusement ride fees were last set by 1982 Public Act 35; ski-lift fees by 1964 Public Act 199. In fiscal year 2019, those fees brought in $69,710 to regulate carnival-amusement rides and $14,737 to regulate ski lifts — against an allocated regulatory cost of $382,227 for each program. State General Fund and other restricted revenue covered the rest: $680,000 combined, covering 81.8% of the carnival-amusement program's cost and 96.1% of the ski program's.

The supervisor position meant to oversee both programs has been vacant since 2016.▸ LARA told auditors that two rounds of job postings drew no qualified applicants.

Elevating-device figures are drawn from a 40-device audit sample in each report, not a full population census — BCC's data did not allow auditors to verify timeliness across all 29,159 active devices. Boiler figures are full-population counts from BCC's own inspection database. Budget and headcount figures cover all of BCC's regulated activities, not the elevator and boiler programs alone.