The heat’s on you, pols tell agency
Residents at a Coney Island public housing development are fuming over NYCHA’s funding withdrawal for renovations of their buildings’ lobbies that were severely damaged during Hurricane Sandy seven years ago.
The $8.5 million for lobby upgrades was part of a $233 million Federal Emergency Management Agency grant set aside in 2016 for overall repairs to O’Dwyer Gardens, Surfside Gardens and NYCHA’s Coney Island Site 8.
The total FEMA outlay for repairs increased to $275 million this year, but according to email correspondence between the New York City Housing Authority and City Councilman Mark Treyger, the repair money for O’Dwyer’s lobby is off the list.
“It is unconscionable how NYCHA is breaking a commitment to O’Dwyer residents and mismanaging federal Sandy recovery dollars by being unable to complete repairs to damaged lobbies,” Treyger said. “Where did the money go, and why are the residents being misled and shortchanged?”
Treyger said his office recently received correspondence from NYCHA’s Recovery and Resilience unit describing how “unfortunate it was that lobby renovations cannot be funded at this time as part of the Coney Island Sites project.”
Sheila Smalls, O’Dwyer Gardens’ tenant association president, said she was so upset by the decision she “took this to the federal monitor for some investigating.”
A federal monitor was appointed to oversee the embattled agency in February.
The overall budget for the three Coney Island developments is supposed to cover a flood-protected heat and hot water system, new plumbing and emergency backup generators.
“This precedent-setting work was originally put out to bid last year, including the lobby work, but due to a variety of market forces and design elements, the bid came in significantly over the budget that NYCHA had for this project,” NYCHA spokeswoman Barbara Brancaccio said.
“To deliver the critical structure and infrastructure investment commitments made to FEMA and the residents, NYCHA had to … remove items not funded or required by FEMA.”
Brancaccio said NYCHA hopes funding for “aesthetic improvements in the lobby” can be restored by local elected officials.
Members of the city’s congressional delegation are demanding NYCHA’s CEO release the Housing Authority’s heating action plan “as soon as possible.”
The demand — signed by 11 members of Congress, including Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hakeem Jeffries — comes as thousands of NYCHA residents have already experienced heat and hot water outages at the very beginning of this year’s cold season.
On Wednesday alone, NYCHA reported on its website that six developments and 1,400 residents experienced heat and hot water outages over the preceding 24 hours.
“While we understand that the action plan is still under review by the federal monitor, we are becoming increasingly concerned about the lack of transparency,” the Tuesday letter to NYCHA CEO Gregory Russ states. “Many of our constituents are already reporting heating outages in their NYCHA units.”
A federal monitor was appointed to oversee NYCHA after a series of scandals rocked the authority over the past several years. NYCHA’s consent decree with the monitor required it to create an action plan that describes how it will respond to outages in each of NYCHA’s 326 developments.
Last month, Rep. Nydia Velazquez (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens) organized a meeting of the state’s two U.S. senators and city members of the House of Representatives where they told NYCHA reps they expected to see the action plan ASAP. A month passed, and the federal monitor still has not approved the release of the plan.
In their letter, the congressional reps said that if the monitor blocks the release of the plan, they expect an explanation as to why.
“We wish to make clear that should NYCHA’s heating action plan be returned to NYCHA without federal monitor approval, we expect to be notified of such an event and be provided a detailed understanding of why the plan was not approved,” the letter states.
NYCHA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.