Breaking 24 hours of silence from a Connecticut vacation spot, Mayor de Blasio admitted through a press aide that the city Housing Authority failed to conduct thousands of required lead paint inspections on his watch — putting innocent children in peril.
The aide also said de Blasio maintains full confidence in NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye — even though she knowingly signed a false report affirming the inspections had been done.
“The mayor believes the identified gaps in NYCHA’s lead-based paint inspections are unacceptable and that tenants deserve better,” spokeswoman Melissa Grace said Wednesday evening.
This admission came after the mayor had refused for more than a day to address the damaging findings on NYCHA’s lead paint failures, released Tuesday in a city Department of Investigation report.
The DOI found that in October 2016, Olatoye certified to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that NYCHA had complied with rules requiring annual lead paint inspections when she knew they hadn’t.
From 2012 through 2013, NYCHA stopped doing annual inspections, and from 2014 through 2016 did not check 55,000 apartments with potential lead paint hazards as required, the DOI found.
During that time, NYCHA repeatedly certified to HUD that the inspections had been performed.
The failure to complete the inspections violated Local Law 1, a 2004 law co-sponsored by de Blasio when he was a city councilman. The law requires that all landlords — including NYCHA, the city’s biggest landlord — perform annual inspections of all apartments believed to contain lead paint.
On Wednesday, Olatoye defended her actions in an interview with the Daily News.
Olatoye, appointed by de Blasio in May 2014, said she had the full support of the mayor.
“It’s important that (the mayor) affirmed that he wants me to continue to identify problems and come up with plans to fix them,” she said. “That’s what he hired me to do, and that’s what I’m doing.”
She said she discussed the DOI report with the mayor, but would not provide details.
On Wednesday, de Blasio, miles from the city in a post-reelection Connecticut vacation, addressed the substance of the report for the first time.
After calling NYCHA’s failures “unacceptable,” the mayor said via Grace he is now considering DOI’s recommendation that an independent monitor be appointed.
But Grace also emphasized, “Mayor de Blasio continues to have full confidence in Chair Olatoye and her work turning around NYCHA. We do not believe there is any evidence that anyone intentionally made any misstatements to HUD.”
NYCHA says 55,000 of its 178,000 apartments have a possible lead paint hazard, including 4,231 housing families with children under age 6.
DOI has said children in 18 of those apartments tested positive for high levels of lead, but NYCHA records show between 2011 and 2016, 202 children living in 133 NYCHA apartments had high blood-lead levels.
Speaking with The News, Olatoye said she told the No. 2 person at HUD of the lead paint noncompliance in September 2016, a month before she filed documents certifying the opposite — that NYCHA was in compliance.
“There was an in-depth presentation of the depth and nature of the (lead paint) challenge. We got agreement on our approach to the problem,” she said. “(HUD) allowed us to begin a corrective action plan.”
On Tuesday, DOI Commissioner Mark Peters noted that whether or not HUD knew about the problem, the public did not. Olatoye says she first learned of the noncompliance in spring 2016 but did not reveal it publicly until a July board meeting.
Holly Leicht, administrator of HUD’s Region II when NYCHA was discussing the issue with the agency, confirmed that HUD knew all about it.
“Shola was upfront with HUD about this problem when she became aware of it,” Leicht said.
HUD funds nearly 100% of NYCHA’s capital projects and 67% of its operations. The rest comes from tenant rents and subsidies from the city and state.
On Wednesday, Assemblyman Walter Mosley (D-Brooklyn) called on Olatoye to resign, and demanded an immediate state audit of NYCHA. Councilman Raphael Salamanca (D-Bronx) called for the appointment of a monitor.
Public Advocate Letitia James demanded that Olatoye show up at her office Thursday, and NYCHA promised she would be there.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has an ongoing investigation whether NYCHA officials deliberately misled the feds about compliance with rules about keeping apartments safe, including checking for lead paint hazards.
