A stunning 53 elected officials from all five boroughs Friday demanded that the city Housing Authority immediately declare a winter emergency to speed up fixing busted boilers.
The letter to NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye is backed by three borough presidents, three members of Congress, 19 city councilmembers, 10 state senators and 18 members of the assembly.
It comes in response to Mayor de Blasio’s announcement Wednesday that he’ll commit $200 million to new NYCHA boilers, but won’t begin the job until July.
More than 50 developments suffered repeat heat outages during the big freeze around New Year’s as the authority’s ancient boilers wheezed and sputtered to keep up with the temperature drop. On Friday, two more developments reported heating outages throughout their buildings.
A declaration of emergency would “cut red tape in the procurement process and increase the speed by which these defective boilers are replaced,” the letter states.
So far, de Blasio has shrugged off his critics on this issue, complaining at a Thursday press conference that the media and advocates who think it can be done quickly aren’t living in “the real world.”
“If anyone has a concern, tell them to come find me because I’m not going to play games with people,” he said.
That could be a lot of people — 5,000 tenants of the Edenwald Houses, the biggest housing project in the Bronx, were having issues Friday. NYCHA said the entire development — all 40 buildings — had experienced heat and hot water outages as the temperature hovered near 26 degrees.
“We had no heat for the last week. We were also without heat from Christmas Eve to Jan. 2,” said tenant Nina Eleven, 39. “You could see your breath in my apartment. It’s been horrible. It’s like living outside.”
In another Edenwald building a block away, tenant James Carpenter, 51, said the heat and hot water just returned Friday afternoon.
“It was like living in an ice box,” he said. “You had to walk around with your coat on, which is no way to live.”
An hour after Edenwald’s heating came back on Friday, NYCHA reported a heat and hot water outage throughout the Brown Houses in East New York, Brooklyn.
Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who started the push for an emergency declaration, said elected officials all over the city have been bombarded with hundreds of calls from public housing residents shivering in frigid apartments.
The emergency status, he said, would allow NYCHA to circumvent usual bidding protocols to speed up hiring new boilers and vendors to install or repair them. He suggested NYCHA employ a procedure known as “design/build” in which one entity designs, builds and installs the required equipment.
“It needs to be done now and I don’t understand why the mayor and NYCHA are so hesitant in calling it what it is — an emergency,” Diaz Jr. said. “At this glacial pace (tenants) are not going to see (new) boilers until the next mayor.”
NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said an emergency declaration won’t solve the issue.
“The problem isn’t procurement regulations, which are the only thing an emergency declaration would ease,” she said. “It’s the design, building and installation of massive boilers and heating systems that takes years. No declaration is going to impact those timeframes. We’re working with the city to find ways to accelerate the permitting and approval processes that are within our control.”
NYCHA and City Hall will face questioning Tuesday during a city Council Oversight Committee hearing looking at why the authority’s heating systems failed at an alarming rate in the last few weeks.
