Mold-kill plan OK
Judge won’t sign off on rest of NYCHA woes
The judge who rejected a proposed plan to impose a federal monitor to handle NYCHA’s many problems Thursday gave a thumbs up to a much narrower plan that focuses only on one persistent issue – toxic mold.
Manhattan Federal Judge William Pauley recently shot down a consent decree NYCHA and Mayor de Blasio signed with federal prosecutors calling for the imposition of a federal monitor to oversee the authority’s compliance with health and safety rules.
The monitor would have held sway over the troubled authority’s handling of a long list of issues, including lead paint removal, busted elevators, and the infestation of mold in apartments.
On Thursday he chose to sign off on a related but much narrower agreement aimed at addressing only the issue of mold. He has ordered NYCHA and the prosecutors to come up with a new broader plan within the next two weeks.
In an 11-page ruling, Judge Pauley approved a modified plan to deal with the mold present in apartments where tenants have asthma. That agreement grew out of a related lawsuit, Baez v. NYCHA, originally settled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in December 2013.
“Ultimately these modifications will better serve the underlying goals of the consent decree of ensuring that NYCHA effectively remediates mold in its apartments,” he wrote.
The suit, brought by Metro Industrial Area Foundation, a housing advocacy non-profit, charged NYCHA with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to remove mold from apartments housing tenants with respiratory issues such as asthma.
In that agreement the Housing Authority put forth a plan to aggressively combat this problem, including cleaning up mold in simpler cases within seven days and more complex cases within 15.
Almost immediately that effort failed, with NYCHA’s mold team consistently missing deadlines or performing inadequate clean up that allowed the mold to return soon after. Pauley then appointed a special master to speed things up, but the turnaround never arrived.
In April Metro IAF, represented by the National Center for Law & Economic Justice, and NYCHA agreed to a new more aggressive plan, but Pauley rejected it as inadequate. NYCHA and the group went back to the drawing board and in July presented their latest plan to the judge.