ICE COLD BLAZ
So, nyCha folks had no heat for a day
MAYOR DE BLASIO said Friday he didn’t want to belittle the challenge faced by the 320,000 public housing residents who have lost heat or hot water service this year — but he did it anyway.
In defending his administration’s response to failing boilers — and in explaining why the city can’t put up more cash to fix them — Hizzoner cut in half the actual amount of time an average heat outage lasts.
“I don’t belittle the challenge but I also want to say the vast majority of those heating outages were for a single day,” de Blasio said on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show. “That doesn’t make it good. I don’t accept that. I want to do better, but I don’t want it to be some kind of stereotype of you know these endless times when people didn’t have heat.”
But the average heating outage actually lasted twice as long as a “single day” — 48 hours, in fact, according the New York City Housing Authority’s under-oath testimony to the City Council. The average hot water outage was 52 hours.
Asked about the discrepancy, Eric Phillips, the mayor’s press secretary, said the NYCHA numbers cover the full heating season and that the mayor was referring only to outages during a January “cold snap.”
The mayor never mentioned the cold snap on the radio, nor did Lehrer — who had said advocates might question why he wouldn’t move money from other areas to fixing the boilers if “the need is so immediate that they don’t have heat in the winter.”
The average outage during the cold snap, which City Hall defined as Jan. 4 to Jan. 14, was 16 hours, Phillips said.
De Blasio’s comments come after his nemesis Gov. Cuomo waded into the NYCHA mess, saying he’d consider declaring a state of emergency at the struggling public housing authority — leading to a day of cross-state sniping .
“If the simple question is does the State of New York want to help us do our work better, I would always welcome help done on a collegial basis, done with us,” de Blasio told Lehrer. “But unfortunately here we see some real contradictions.”
He said Albany was several budgets behind on providing funding for public housing, accusing Cuomo of a “pattern” of criticizing city operations but not offering actual funding to help.
“Is this a political exercise or is this about actually helping the people who live in public housing?” he asked. “If it’s about helping the people who live in public housing, again of course, if there is a way legally and appropriately to speed up the work that is done at NYCHA, of course I would embrace that.”