Resignations slam NYCHA
Major figures walk out as agency deals with lead, mold
Just as Mayor de Blasio and the city Housing Authority ramp up their battle to combat public housing’s lead and mold nightmares, key NYCHA staffers handling the difficult reform efforts have resigned.
De Blasio announced Monday that starting this week, the city will dramatically increase the number of public housing apartments to be inspected for lead paint to 130,000 from the current 55,000.
The change in policy followed the revelation that more than 800 young children living in New York City Housing Authority apartments have registered elevated blood-lead levels in the past few years – far more than the initial handful the city claimed.
And the announcement came 12 days after the head of the NYCHA unit in charge of those inspections suddenly resigned after federal investigators raided the Long Island City, Queens, office where he worked.
The unit handling lead paint abatement has been targeted since June 11, when the Manhattan U.S. attorney filed a devastating complaint showing widespread deception in the authority’s handling of lead poisoning and other serious health issues. Days later, federal and city investigators raided the technical services unit offices in Long Island City and within the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side to obtain records for an ongoing criminal probe.
During the raid in Long Island City, agents demanded the NYCHA-assigned cell phone of Robert Stern, the $112,000-a-year coordinator for environmental field operations, according to two sources familiar with the investigation. At the time, Stern ran the unit that handles inhouse lead paint inspections for NYCHA, officials said.
Stern turned over his phone, the sources say, and on June 29 announced his resignation, leaving the crucial unit that’s tasked with coordinating the mayor’s plan to check the 130,000 NYCHA apartments without a coordinator. NYCHA officials said he’d been planning to retire in February, but stayed on at the request of his boss.
At a news conference Wednesday announcing funding for a new community center at NYCHA’s Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, de Blasio refused to take questions and walked away as reporters shouted out queries about lead paint.
The other crucial issue is NYCHA’s longstanding struggle to eradicate mold infestation from its aging apartments. NYCHA was sued in December 2013 by the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, a housing advocacy group, alleging its failure to clean up toxic mold from apartments of tenants with asthma violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. NYCHA entered into a consent decree and agreed to attack the problem aggressively.
The case recently reached a crucial juncture. After more than four years of trying to reach the originally agreed-upon goals, both NYCHA and the plaintiffs concluded the effort wasn’t working. In recent months, the number of cases where mold reoccurred after apartments were allegedly cleaned had begun to rise.
In April, both sides proposed a revised consent decree, creating a new ombudsman and adding experts on mold and technology to improve the cleanup campaign. Manhattan Federal Judge William Pauley rejected that plan, and on June 26, NYCHA staffer Donna Murphy — who’d been the only staff attorney to handle the case since March 2015 — filed a joint statement with her boss, Kelly MacNeal, and the Metro IAF lawyers trying to convince Pauley that their new plan would work.
On July 2, Murphy suddenly withdrew from the case, announcing in a letter to the judge that she was resigning from NYCHA effective July 6. On Tuesday, there were no NYCHA staff lawyers present – Murphy had been replaced by Miriam Skolnik of the private firm Herzfeld & Rubin – during a hearing before Pauley addressing both the mold lawsuit and the federal consent decree.
Asked what impact the Stern and Murphy resignations would have on reform efforts, NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake responded, “With a new chair and GM building out their leadership team, we are moving NYCHA in the right direction. With that, we are an agency of over 10,000 people and departures are a normal course of action.”