De Blasio denies he mis ‘lead’
Excuse on NYCHA toll
City Hall Bureau Chief
Mayor de Blasio insisted on Thursday that he wasn’t cherrypicking data when he claimed that only four children in public housing had tested positive for elevated lead levels while the number was actually above 200.
He said that although he had briefing papers showing 202 such children had tested positive for elevated lead levels between 2010 and 2015, he used the lower figure in a press conference this past November because there was confusion over which kids should have been included in the tally.
“The problem in this whole discussion is there’s never been a single standard,” de Blasio said at an unrelated press conference in the East Village Thursday.
“The federal standards changed over time, different laws require different things. We’ve all been trying to speak to this without having a common language.”
As The Post reported this week, documents released by City Hall show de Blasio had received the briefing papers citing 202 cases between 2010 and 2015 a day before he announced on Nov. 20 that just four children had tested positive from 2014 and 2016.
At the time of the November announcement, the public had just learned through a Department of Investigation report that the New York City Housing Authority stopped conducting annual inspections for lead paint from late 2012 through May 2016, despite being required to do so by law.
The probe also revealed then-NYCHA Chair Shola Olatoye had falsely reported to feds that the inspections were being conducted.
The administration and Health Department didn’t come clean on the universe of impacted children until this August, when they acknowledged that 1,160 children at NYCHA had registered high lead levels in their blood since 2012.
The figure ballooned in part because the city in January adopted a lower blood-level threshold of 5 micrograms per deciliter for inspecting apartments. The lower threshold had been recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2012.
The feds required the city to employ the lower figure instead of the 10 microgram level previously used by the Health Department.
The mayor’s explanation Thursday came the same day he named his sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, as the city’s firstever “lead czar,” with the goal of stamping out lead poisoning.
Garcia will stay in her current role, but hand off some duties to a deputy as she creates a road map over the next 90 days for reducing lead-poisoning cases to zero.