NYCHA Exec Pledges To Fix Heat Failures Within A Day Next Winter

NEW YORK, NY — The New York City Housing Authority is revamping its customer-service systems and planning repairs to make sure no tenant goes without heat for more than a day next winter, a top operations official said last week.

But critics say the beleaguered agency is doing too little, too late.

“I think it’s their obligation, and they should have been doing it, and they never did,” said Jacki Rogoff, an attorney with At-Risk Community Services, a nonprofit that's suing NYCHA.

NYCHA plans to roll out a change to its automated phone call system that will let tenants instantly report that their apartment still lacks heat, even if it's back on in the rest of their development, by August, said Cathy Pennington, the housing authority’s newly minted executive vice president of operations.

That’s among the steps NYCHA is taking to fix any heat outages within 24 hours during the next heating season, which starts in October and runs through May, Pennington said.

“We’re trying to listen to what the issues were, develop better responses, improve our reporting to tenants on statuses,” Pennington told Patch in an interview last week.

The goal seems like a tall order after roughly 323,000 NYCHA tenants lost heat or hot water between October and January, with the average outage lasting at least two days. About a third of outages since October have lasted longer than 24 hours, a NYCHA spokeswoman said.

NYCHA is in the process of planning annual “preventative maintenance” and “major repairs” for this summer to shore up its aging heat systems, said Pennington, who took one of NYCHA’s top operations jobs last fall and was formally appointed last month.

Crews are already tackling problems with hot-water systems and will use a slate of inspections to determine what work needs to be done to keep failures to a minimum, she said.

“The focus is being ready,” Pennington said.

Tenants have long complained about discrepancies between what NYCHA tells them about the state of their heat and what they experience on the ground, said Danny Barber, the chairman of the Citywide Council of Presidents, a tenant group that filed a landmark lawsuit against NYCHA with Rogoff's organization.

When a development loses heat, NYCHA makes an automated phone call to tenants breaking the news, then follows up with another call when the problem is supposedly fixed.

Problems with heating lines can leave some buildings without heat even after workers get a faulty boiler back online, Pennington said. Last winter, that meant frustrated NYCHA tenants went without heat even after the repair ticket on their buildings had been closed.

But by next winter, NYCHA plans to include a prompt in the second robocall that will allow tenants to press a certain key and alert the housing authority if they're still without heat, Pennington said. That will help NYCHA dispatch staffers to fix the problem, she said.

“Because we don’t have enough staff in the middle of the night or during the day to check every single unit at a development, this method will at least be able to alert us — this whole development, we’re good except this one building,” Pennington said.

While the new phone call system will help address a longstanding problem, Barber said, it doesn’t help the fact that the housing authority lacks enough staff to keep boilers running effectively.

“These are the reasons why we need to come to the table,” Barber said, referring to tenant leaders and city officials. “We all need to … sit down and talk about the issues and how we’re going to combat them to make them better. It’s time for the solutions to take effect.”

The plan is just a “good optic” that puts the onus too much on tenants, Rogoff said.

NYCHA's preparations follow intense scrutiny of its response to the systemic heat problems tenants faced during an unusually cold winter. The housing authority also drew fire after revelations in November that it failed to conduct legally mandated lead inspections for four years but falsely told federal authorities otherwise.

The scrutiny prompted political battles over NYCHA's leadership and operations, culminating in Gov. Andrew Cuomo declaring a state of emergency for NYCHA last week.

Cuomo’s order forces Mayor Bill de Blasio, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Barber to choose an emergency manager who will decide how to spend roughly $550 million in state funding for NYCHA. City officials say they want to use $350 million of that to replace boilers at two dozen complexes.

While she defended NYCHA's response to this winter's heat problems, Pennington said housing authority executives are trying to repair the damage that recent scandals have done to tenants’ trust with a “reset” on its operations.

NYCHA has tried to streamline things by making more services available online, she said, such as an updated dashboard showing which buildings are without heat and ways for tenants to file paperwork digitally.

Budget constraints mean NYCHA can’t hire many skilled workers it needs, like carpenters and plumbers, but the authority plans to pay outside contractors more than $100 million to help fill some gaps, Pennington said.

“What I hear from tenants is they don’t want to talk about it. They want to see the action,” Pennington said. “We need to listen. I think we have a good read on areas that we really need to pay attention to, but I really think we need to demonstrate our commitment to service by trying to deliver more services, more timely, and with the highest level of quality that we can.”

(Lead image: Cathy Pennington, left, NYCHA's executive vice president of operations, takes an oath at a City Council hearing in February with Chairwoman Shola Olatoye. Photo by William Alatriste/New York City Council)