Lead Scandal Has 'Shaken' Trust In NYCHA, Council Members Say

NEW YORK CITY HALL — City Council members lambasted the New York City Housing Authority's chairwoman Tuesday for failing to tell the public about its failure to inspect thousands of public-housing apartments for lead.

During a nearly five-hour committee hearing, Council officials slammed Chairwoman Shola Olatoye for hiding from the Council the fact that NYCHA hadn't done required annual checks at 55,000 apartments for four years.

Olatoye first learned in April 2016 that NYCHA hadn't been following a city law requiring yearly inspections at apartments presumed to have lead paint where kids younger than 6 lived. But she waited 15 months to say anything publicly — despite having told the Council in March 2016 that NYCHA was following the law.

"My confidence in the credibility of this agency has been shaken with your testimony today," Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) told Olatoye on Tuesday before the Committee on Public Housing, which Torres chairs.

The marathon hearing came three weeks after a city Department of Investigation report that revealed NYCHA had failed to inspect apartments for lead from 2013 to 2016, but falsely told federal authorities that it had done the inspections.

As part of its ongoing probe, the DoI is examining whether NYCHA wrongly exempted more than 20,000 apartments from federal lead-testing requirements, Investigations Commissioner Mark Peters told the commmittee.

The DoI investigation is one of three active inquiries into NYCHA's lead-testing practices. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan started probing the authority in November 2015, and Public Advocate Letitia James' office launched her own investigation two weeks ago.

The committee, which Torres chairs, grilled Olatoye about why she signed forms falsely certifying to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that NYCHA had done lead inspections in three of those years.

She filed one of them in the fall of 2016, well after she knew the housing authority hadn't followed federal law — and even after she told HUD officials about the lapse in person.

Olatoye thought those in-person disclosures were "sufficient" to file the compliance form without noting that the tests hadn't been done. But she didn't consult Mayor Bill de Blasio or his administration about whether that was the right move. She didn't specify whether HUD officials told her the filing would be acceptable.

"When I disclosed to HUD the compliance gaps that I had identified, I believed those disclosures were sufficient," Olatoye said.

NYCHA was focused on inspecting apartments as soon as top officials learned of the lead-testing lapse, Olatoye said. The authority was forced to grapple with the problem as it juggled other long-term projects to right NYCHA's ship after decades of neglect, she said.

But Torres and others argued she should have made the problem known before July 2017, when she sent a letter to all NYCHA residents disclosing the failures. The housing authority will have to work hard to regain its residents' trust, Council members said.

"The communication, certainly, to me is unacceptable," Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson (D-Bronx) said.

Olatoye expressed remorse for the communication breakdown but argued that NYCHA is headed in the right direction overall.

"We could have communicated in a more precise way. Going forward we will continue to improve on that communication," Olatoye said.

Torres questioned whether NYCHA could be certain it had actually fixed problems in every apartment that had lead paint in the past, given that several workers who fixed apartments with lead paint lacked the federal certifications to do that work.

As of last year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency had certified about 30 NYCHA workers to properly fix apartments where lead paint posed a danger, Olatoye said. But 300 others lacked training required by HUD and the city, she said. NYCHA has said about 2,300 apartments were remediated last year.

NYCHA is currently working to expand the number of EPA-certified workers to 144 and plans to have an outside contractor train its 2,700 front-line workers, Olatoye said.

City officials, including Olatoye, maintained that about 55,000 public-housing apartments are presumed to have lead paint and therefore need annual lead inspections under federal rules. About 21,000 others built before 1960, the year lead paint was outlawed in New York City, had their lead problems addressed and are exempt from testing requirements, officials said.

But Torres said there's a possibility some of those units could have been exempted based on inspections by unqualified workers.

"There is a risk that some of those units, if not all of them, were improperly abated and therefore improperly exempted," he said.

City officials said there's no evidence so far that any apartments were wrongly removed from NYCHA's lead-testing scheme. The Office of Housing Preservation and Development must give approval whenever NYCHA wants to exempt apartments from annual lead inspections, officials said.

"The data tells us right now that those 55,000 units are where we need to focus our attention to eliminate the lead-based hazard," Olatoye said.

(Lead image: A person walks in front of an East Harlem NYCHA complex in 2015. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)