Call it “The House that NYCHA Built” — staff plumber William Naddeo’s $500,000 New Jersey manse.
Naddeo earns $86,000 in base pay, but he’s pushed his overall take to $190,000 for two consecutive years, thanks to Housing Authority inefficiency, understaffing and a huge backlog of needed repairs.
As a result, Naddeo and his blue-collar colleagues work extra hours to keep up with 338,000 overdue repair orders. That backlog has recently grown worse.
More than 90,000 of those work orders require skilled tradesmen, and many of those orders won’t be fixed until 2014, the authority admits.
Ray Rondino of Plumbers Local 1 said the reason for the backup is simple: the authority is trying to maintain 178,000 apartments with 180 plumbers.
“There are not enough plumbers to handle the work. . . . So the overload has to go into the night,” he said.
For the last five years, he said, Local 1 has pressed for more plumbers, but, he said, NYCHA has refused.
“The (workers) should not be criticized — they should be commended,” he added.
Agency spokeswoman Sheila Stainback said overtime is automatically triggered when the shift ends. As of Friday, she said there were only 4,653 outstanding plumbing repair orders.
“If NYCHA were to hire more plumbers, some plumbing repairs may be attended to quicker, but that would result in many more of these workers earning significant OT than we have right now,” she said.
Regardless of how many plumbers are hired, Rondino says another problem is the time wasted by plumbers and all of NYCHA’s skilled tradespeople as they search in vain for parts that NYCHA buys for repairs.
The parts are supposed to be kept in 5,200 storerooms spread across the city, but as The News revealed last month, NYCHA doesn’t track what it has squirreled away.
That means a part may be available at one of the authority’s developments, but there’s no system in place to let the tradesman know it’s in hand.
As a result, NYCHA’s skilled tradespeople such as plumbers, plasterers, carpenters and others spend 120,000 work hours each year just searching for the parts they need, internal NYCHA documents obtained by The News state.
And half the time, the worker can’t even find the required part, so the repair is delayed, the documents state. Meanwhile, the overtime flows, year after year.
A review of payroll records found NYCHA paid out $4 million in overtime to plumbers last year, with Naddeo at the top of the OT heap two years in a row. Most plumbers averaged $30,000 to $71,000 in OT, but supervising plumbers like Naddeo made even more.
As a supervisor, Naddeo must be on duty if any NYCHA plumber is working overtime. So in fiscal 2012, he worked 1,006 hours of overtime — the equivalent of tacking on roughly 20 hours to every workweek for a year. The year before it was 1,084 OT hours, the equivalent of a 61-hour workweek every week of the year.
At his home in Monroe Township last week, Naddeo declined to answer questions about his job or his 3,000-square-foot four-bedroom mansion with its in-ground pool and stylish black Ford Mustang in the driveway.
But Naddeo’s certainly not alone. More than 50 other NYCHA plumbers were able to add another 50% to their paychecks with overtime, a News analysis of payroll records shows.
Plumbing supervisor Joel Perosi made $169,639, nearly doubling his $88,288 base pay with 850 hours of overtime worth another $81,351.
Plumbing supervisor Robert Procida came in third, taking home $160,592 between $88,288 in base pay and $72,304 made in 735 hours of OT.
Perosi and Procida could not be reached for comment.
With Benjamin Lesser
gsmith@nydailynews.com
