Let the sun shine
Ex-housing big sez make $10M report public
A FORMER TOP CITY housing authority official who voted to approve a $10 million taxpayer-funded agency report card — which taxpayers aren’t allowed to see — now says the document should be made public.
Ex-NYCHA board member Earl Andrews says he never saw the language in the contract he approved that bars public release of the top-down review of the agency by Boston Consulting Group.
“I thought that all of it was going to be public. Why issue a report that nobody sees?” he told The News, which last month revealed that BCG’s expensive final report was for “internal use only.”
Andrews also said he was aware that another board member who voted for the contract, NYCHA Chairman John Rhea, is a former BCG employee — and that Rhea was personally handling bringing BCG in to work for the authority. “I can’t say what discussions they had with John because I wasn’t there,” he said.
The $6 million contract — which later grew to $10 million — was handled in a manner outside usual rules meant to save taxpayers money, according to interviews and records.
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development, which funds much of NYCHA, requires housing authorities to compare costs to other vendors to make sure the same job can’t be done for less. But that did not happen with the BCG contract.
Andrews told The News that Rhea, who was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2009 to his $212,000-a-year post, handled the contract personally and that BCG was the only consultant considered for the job.
NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback confirmed that BCG “initiated the contact with the chairman about their prior work with the Atlanta Housing Authority and the chairman passed it on to NYCHA senior staff.”
BCG was hired to study all aspects of NYCHA, the nation’s biggest housing authority with 600,000 tenants. NYCHA is currently struggling with an annual budget gap expected to average about $50 million over the next few years, while 265,000 applicants remain on a wait list for apartments.
BCG made eight specific recommendations, but the authority blacked them out in documents released last month to The News under the open-records law.
On March 2, 2011, Andrews joined Rhea and board member Margarita Lopez in voting to hire BCG for the examination of the agency.
Lopez — a former City Council member who now makes $206,000 as a full-time NYCHA board member — refused to answer questions about the contract.
Though Rhea’s biography on the NYCHA website does not mention his four years at BCG from 1992-1995, Stainback said Rhea’s former employment at BCG “was known throughout the authority, prior to awarding the contract.”
A week after voting on the BCG contract, Andrews was forced to resign his board position after nine years for using NYCHA letterhead to write a letter of support for a friend charged with possessing child pornography.
Last week, Andrews told The News he now regrets approving the BCG contract.
“Government has an obligation to be transparent and I think in certain instances certain things aren’t done and there are certain things that should be corrected so that the public at least has an understanding about what was supposed to happen in this process,” he said. “A lot was lost in this process.”