Get the lead out
Using all the right words (“One child exposed to lead is one child too many”; “What happened should not have happened and will not happen again”), Mayor de Blasio takes the mismeasure of the catastrophe that is his New York City Housing Authority — a bureaucracy so bungling that for years top executives had no clue of a basic safety breakdown in their midst.
Now that he’s back from vacation and finally speaking publicly on the scandal exposing dangerous mismanagement at a housing agency he’d vowed to fix, de Blasio sought on Monday to signal a sense of personal urgency about getting NYCHA’s house in order.
He helpfully owns up to grievous missteps — and unhelpfully confuses matters by suggesting the federal government set up NYCHA to fail.
“There were changes in the federal government’s own guidance over time,” he shrugged, as if to suggest some grounds for abandoning mandatory annual inspections. The facts, very simply, are these: Both city and federal law plainly require NYCHA to conduct annual inspections of apartments where lead paint applied generations ago may lurk under surfaces.
Local Law 1 requires annual visual inspections of older apartments where kids under age 6 live. Federal law requires annual inspections of all apartments where the possibility of chipping lead paint lurks; NYCHA has about 55,000 of those.
Either way, NYCHA is obligated to cover or remove the paint where little hands are at risk of putting chips in little mouths.
Law, schmaw. The city Department of Investigation found that starting in 2012, before de Blasio or current NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye took their posts, someone in management (who? how?) decided to suspend the inspections, even as NYCHA kept telling the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development they were happening.
Only last year did Olatoye discover the epic screwup and order inspections to resume.
Now begins the belated rush to set things right: Two resignations in NYCHA’s upper ranks; a demotion; the mayor’s appointment of a NYCHA compliance official to check everything twice. And meantime, inspections of thousands of leadrisk apartments where small kids reside.
De Blasio says too that he’ll welcome a federal monitor, if prosecutors with the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office consent.
Bring it on. It’s been two years since then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara first asked NYCHA for its lead records. A federal settlement, and monitor, can’t arrive soon enough.