Sanit chief to serve as ‘lead czar’

Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia has a new side job: Ridding the city of lead paint.

Mayor de Blasio said she’d be the city’s new “senior adviser for citywide lead prevention” — a role he dubbed the “Lead Czar” — while also continuing to run the city’s sanitation department.

The new position comes as the city has been embroiled in a scandal over lead paint in New York City Housing Authority buildings. Garcia (inset) will be responsible for coordinating efforts to reduce lead exposure in both public housing and private housing, where exposure is much more common.

Garcia’s current gig doesn’t have anything to do with lead or buildings issues, but Hizzoner said she was named to the role for her management acumen.

“She’s someone, between her career at Sanitation and her career at Environmental Protection, who knows a lot about operations, knows a lot about various regulatory issues, knows a lot about having to work across agencies and has an agency that is working well and we believed fundamentally could free up the time to take on this new responsibility,” de Blasio said.

It’s not the first time de Blasio has put a commissioner in charge of two things at once — School Construction Authority head Lorraine Grillo was named Department of Design and Construction commissioner earlier this year, while continuing to lead the SCA.

De Blasio said he wants Garcia to lead a multi-agency “Vision-Zero” approach to end childhood lead exposure in the city.

“She is going to be in charge of reading a single, unified approach across all agencies that literally can pinpoint any apartment or any child at any moment and make sure the maximum effort is being applied there,” de Blasio said. “And I absolutely think she’s got the skill and the bandwidth to do that.”