Dirty rotten scoundrels
NYCHA sold off supplies needed in fixes, cleanup
AS FRUSTRATED NYCHA employees were told cleanup and repair supplies weren’t available, the agency was quietly selling off boxes and boxes of unused supplies, a Daily News investigation has found.
In one case last fall, it appears NYCHA actually gave away cartons of brand-new plumbing and heating supplies worth tens of thousands of dollars in a botched auction.
“They’d say they didn’t have material to clean with. It was a continuous complaining and concern. They didn’t have mops. They didn’t have buckets,” said Greg Floyd, president of Teamsters Local 237, which represents 8,000 NYCHA workers. “Now to find out that the Housing Authority was sitting on all of these things? Some of my members didn’t have uniforms. Come to find out they had uniforms. They were warehousing all this material.”
This was part of NYCHA’s planned sale of $18.1 million in warehoused supplies — first disclosed last month by the Daily News and confirmed Thursday by NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye at a City Council hearing.
At the hearing, Public Housing Committee Chairman Ritchie Torres asked why the cashstrapped agency was selling off brand new items for pennies on the dollar.
“Why did they go unused and why were they purchased in the first place?” Torres (D-Bronx) asked.
Olatoye said her team discovered a “significant amount of excess inventory that had been ordered by the previous administration,” much of it now obsolete and unusable.
Records show NYCHA sold off a small amount of supplies in 2010, increased the sales in 2011, and then offered up much more last year, documents show.
The agency sold off cases of cleaning supplies, VCRs, tools, floor polishers, food waste disposers, janitorial supplies and refrigerator and stove parts.
In May, they sold off unopened boxes of uniforms. In June, they sold off fasteners, tools and drain cleaner. Out went electrical supplies and elevator parts by the pallet-load.
“Since 2007, the members have been complaining about the cleaning supplies,” Local 237 President Floyd said. “It was a complete mismanagement of the workforce.”
In November, NYCHA offered up a huge cache of plumbing and heating supplies, mostly brand new, sitting on 17 pallets in the Fiorentino Plaza Houses in Brooklyn.
The lot included hundreds of toilet parts, sink fixtures, shower heads, soap dishes, faucets and drains, 2,800 feet of copper tubing, dozens of brand new light fixtures, and 49 steam heaters worth $27,000.
The bid opened at $1,000 and Medina Building Maintenance & Restoration of Newark, agreed to buy it all for $4,550, records show.
But NYCHA wound up giving it all away, according to sources familiar with the sale. Medina discovered some items on NYCHA’s list weren’t there, so the authority simply gifted the whole lot, sources said.