ACTUALLY, I WAS OUT OF LOOP ON LEAD WOE
Mayor says that even as he responded to News stories, ‘issue was just not on radar’
Mayor de Blasio played dumb on Monday, saying he knew nothing about the city Housing Authority’s long-running effort to hide dangerous lead paint — despite the Daily News’ blanket coverage of the crisis going back to 2015.
The mendacious mayor pretended not to know that the New York City Housing Authority put children at risk by routinely contesting Department of Health findings of dangerous lead levels in public housing, even though his administration had commented on scores of News reports about the practice.
“If anyone had presented to me along the way that these reports from the Department of Health were being contested, that would have been the day that we started the process of turning all that around,” de Blasio said at a NYCHA press conference in the Bronx.
“It has now been ended once and for all.”
It was hardly a state secret. The News first wrote about it years ago, before the NYCHA lead paint crisis garnered wider attention from the city’s other media and elected officials.
The city only stopped contesting the inspections this September, nearly a year after the city’s failure to inspect apartments became a city scandal with the release of a Department of Investigation report.
At the Betances Houses Monday, Hizzoner tried to rewrite history — when asked why the city didn’t stop challenging the inspections sooner, he insisted “this issue was just not on the radar, and it is just the honest truth.”
“I wish we had like perfect field vision. I wish we could see everything happening in the whole city at all times. It’s just not the honest truth,” an amnesiac de Blasio said. “We rely on a whole host of community groups, resident associations, elected officials, the media, et cetera, to bring issues forward in addition to what we do all day.”
While the memory-challenged mayor claims to have just learned of the Housing Authority’s practice of contesting positive lead tests, The News has been reporting on this issue for more than three and a half years.
On April 13, 2015, the News first revealed this policy, writing about a 2-year-old who registered an alarming blood-lead level living in a Brooklyn development where the city health inspectors registered the presence of lead paint. Though the child had never lived or even spent significant time anywhere else, NYCHA performed a paint chip test and declared the apartment leadfree.
In response to the News story, NYCHA released a “Fact Sheet” on lead to tenants and elected officials,
insisting that NYCHA “complies with federal, state and city regulations.” At the time, top NYCHA executives knew this wasn’t true and that NYCHA had stopped performing required annual lead paint inspections in 2012.
In March 2016 word emerged that the Manhattan U.S. attorney was investigating whether NYCHA was telling the truth about lead paint inspections and other issues, de Blasio insisted that the city has “a very aggressive inspection and abatement program and that is certainly being carried out in the Housing Authority and has been for years.”
But in April 2016 the mayor was informed by thenNYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye that this wasn’t true, and that NYCHA had been failing to follow local law on required inspections for years. At this point, the mayor decided not to correct the record and kept this disturbing information from tenants and the public for more than a year. This effort to hide NYCHA’s failures was first reported by The News Nov. 19, 2017.
On June 12, 2016, The News uncovered dozens more cases of children living in NYCHA where the Health Department found lead paint that NYCHA then claimed didn’t exist. Again NYCHA and the city Health Department put out a “Fact” statement claiming the authority did “rigorous work” to “remediate any lead-based paint and performs annual inspections of units for lead.”
NYCHA admitted 202 children living in NYCHA had tested positive for elevated blood-lead levels. The city Health Department found lead in 63 of those apartments, but The News found that NYCHA did its own tests and insisted lead was present in only 17 of those units. At the time, critics told The News this pattern of NYCHA contesting Health Department results indicated the true number of children with lead was much higher.
In a complaint filed against NYCHA in June, federal prosecutors said top authority management knew that NYCHA was still not in compliance on lead paint inspections when they issued their “Fact” sheet — another example of NYCHA’s false statements on lead.
Then in June federal prosecutors issued a blistering report, specifically castigating NYCHA for its policy of contesting health department lead tests that come up positive. “Success in the contestation process does not answer the question whether the child was poisoned by lead paint in the home.”
They cited a News story on a child in the Red Hook Houses who registered dangerous lead level in a home where the health department registered lead that NYCHA’s lab test said wasn’t there.
Pressed by The News on why he at least did not end the practice of contesting the inspections sooner in the course of the last year — when lead paint most definitely was on his radar — de Blasio again pointed to other priorities he had for NYCHA dating back to the beginning of his tenure that seemed more pressing than lead.
“There were a host of other problems that were very urgent. I respect if anyone in the media or in elective office says why are we not able to do everything at once. The honest truth is we have a huge number of things we’re trying to do just when it comes to public housing, let alone everything else we want to do,” de Blasio said.