Council to examine slow response to NYCHA orgy

The City Council’s investigations panel will hold a hearing next month to grill NYCHA managers on why they took so long to address allegations of on-the-clock sex parties at a Bronx public housing development.

The Committee on Oversight & Investigations will partner with the Public Housing Committee for an Oct. 11 hearing that will look at who knew what in the months between May when NYCHA says it first learned of the allegations and the Friday in late August when it quietly reassigned the entire staff of the Throggs Neck Houses.

Days after the reassignment the Daily News revealed that NYCHA had been aware for months of allegations that supervisors and staff were having booze-fueled orgies inside a groundskeeper shop, sometimes putting in for overtime.

Workers told The News they were mistreated by managers if they didn’t go along or complained to higher-ups. Two supervisors and one caretaker were suspended shortly after The News broke the story.

Earlier in the summer the city Department of Investigation was given two separate tips on the shenanigans at Throggs Neck, but kicked back both to NYCHA managers and didn’t open their own investigation until after The News revealed what was going on.

“Were it not for the NYC press corps, which cast a harsh light into the underground debauchery at Throggs Neck Houses, the Housing Authority would have never suspended those responsible,” Torres wrote to NYCHA Interim Chairman Stanley Brezenoff on Tuesday. “That accountability only happens AFTER a period of intense public shaming is itself an indictment of just how desensitized NYCHA has become to its own mismanagement.”

The inquiry by Councilman Ritchie Torres and Public Housing Committee Chair Alicka Amprty-Samuel, (DBrooklyn), comes after the Manhattan U.S. Attorney filed a complaint in June detailing years of failure and cover-ups at the nation’s biggest public housing authority. NYCHA entered into a consent decree agreeing to the appointment of a federal monitor.

Torres notified Brezenoff — who’s been appointed temporary chairman while Mayor de Blasio seeks a permanent replacement for former Chairwoman Shola Olatoye — that the hearing will look at “not only the sequence of events leading up to the mass reassignment and subsequent suspensions but also the systemic breakdowns that underlie the months of inaction.”