Gov will visit troubled units in slap at Blaz
WITH THE mayor jetting around the country on the taxpayers’ dime, Gov. Cuomo planned to drop in on his turf Monday — visiting a Bronx public housing development where tenants have long been suffering with miserable conditions in a bureaucratic twilight zone.
On Sunday, Cuomo also moved a step closer to an emergency declaration at NYCHA, but made clear any effort to jump-start the pace of repairs there must bypass the authority’s bureaucracy.
The governor’s counsel, Alphonso David, even suggested — in a letter sent Sunday to First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and a lawyer for public housing tenants, James Walden. — replacing NYCHA’s management to speed things up.
With Mayor de Blasio out of town, Cuomo was set to meet Monday with residents of the Jackson Houses in the South Bronx, where tenants have been complaining about multiple repair issues for years.
At that moment, de Blasio — who has been attacked by Cuomo over the last week for NYCHA’s mismanagement of heat and lead paint issues — will be at a U.S. Conference of Mayors session on the 2020 census in Austin, Texas.
He then plans to fly to Washington to give a speech to the National League of Cities.
Cuomo’s visit came at the invitation of Walden, the attorney representing tenant leaders who recently filed suit against NYCHA demanding that the court appoint an independent monitor to manage the troubled agency.
The suit followed widespread boiler outages since October that have left 323,000 NYCHA tenants without heat at some point, sometimes for days at a time.
And NYCHA management has been called out for falsely claiming they’ve been performing required lead paint inspections when they knew they weren’t. Three top authority managers have resigned amid calls for NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye to resign.
Last week, on behalf of the Citywide Council of Presidents, a NYCHA tenant leadership group, Walden asked legislative leaders to declare a state of emergency. He sent a copy of his letter to Cuomo and invited the governor to meet with tenants.
On Sunday, Cuomo accepted. The forum with the group of public housing residents will allow the governor to hear firsthand about the many issues they now confront day to day.
“We know there are continuing health hazards to tenants who are being exposed to lead paint and mold and living without heat and hot water after years of neglect,” Walden said. “We have no confidence whatsoever that these serious issues are being addressed.” In response, de Blasio spokeswoman Olivia Lapeyrolerie said, “The mayor’s public housing investments are at record levels, while the governor’s promises have fallen far short. After three decades of Andrew Cuomo’s political involvement in New York City, we do welcome his new interest in helping our city’s public housing tenants.”
In his letter to City Hall and the Council leader, David pushed a protocol also supported by de Blasio — design-build, which allows the hiring of a single vendor to perform both the design and construction of a project. That would speed up the time it takes to upgrade NYCHA’s aging heating systems, for instance, by nearly two years.
David, however, suggested it might be best for NYCHA management to be kept out of the process.
“Design/build will not be effective if contractors must navigate the current maze of NYCHA bureaucracy and regulations,” David wrote.
David’s suggestion appears to contradict the approach embraced by de Blasio on Thursday, when he called for the state to approve design-build approach that would be handled by NYCHA managers.
De Blasio and NYCHA have been under increasing pressure since a brutal cold snap that started New Year’s Day left thousands of tenants without heat.