Cuomo hits agency on lies about apt. repair requests

NYCHA workers’ practice of closing out thousands of maintenance requests without actually doing any repairs is “outrageous,” Gov. Cuomo said Sunday.

“They lied about it. They didn’t even pretend,” Cuomo said in response to a Daily News report Sunday that NYCHA workers blew off repair requests by forging tenant signatures or simply tagging them “tenant not home.”

“If you had been through the buildings, it was just obvious that the work wasn’t being done,” Cuomo said.

Many NYCHA tenants said they had been waiting years for refrigerator repairs or to have holes in their walls repaired. By late 2012, the backlog was up to 420,000 repair requests.

“The way they handled it was just to say the tenant wasn’t home, and they crossed it off the list,” Cuomo said. “It just confirmed what you already knew.”

Cuomo — a former chief of the federal Housing and Urban Development Department — spoke as a coalition of NYCHA tenant groups in Brooklyn endorsed his reelection.

In June, the city agreed with the federal government to appoint a monitor to oversee repairs to NYCHA buildings, which house 400,000 people.

Under the agreement, the city must spend at least $1 billion on repairs to the buildings in the next four years, and commit to spending $200 million annually until the problems are fixed.

The city and the federal government are looking for a monitor to implement the settlement.