City council members confronted NYCHA over its ballooning overtime costs on Tuesday, responding to a Daily News exposé about plumbers who’ve worked so much OT that they earn more than the authority chairwoman.
“Have you looked at the math to make sure that you’re using the money wisely?” an incredulous Councilman Jumaane Williams asked NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye and other agency execs during a hearing on how the authority’s repair problems have affected tenant safety.
The News reported Tuesday that NYCHA’s overtime costs have skyrocketed, increasing at a faster pace than those of other city agencies that traditionally rely heavily on OT use, including the NYPD and the FDNY.
In fiscal year 2008, NYCHA spent $38.3 million on OT. In fiscal year 2014, that figure stood at $106.8 million — an increase of about 178%, according to a payroll analysis by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
As a result of the staggering rise in OT, four NYCHA plumbers made more than the $210,000 that Olatoye is paid. And supervisory plumber Robert Procida topped the list with $88,288 base pay plus $142,425 in OT and $1,746 in other pay for a total of $232,459 — or more than Mayor de Blasio’s $225,000 salary.
Citing The News’ story, Williams, a Brooklyn Democrat, noted that the $106 million NYCHA spent on overtime was greater than the $77 million budget gap the Housing Authority faces this year. “Will it cost us less in overtime if we just hired more plumbers?” he asked.
NYCHA Vice President for Operations Brian Clarke acknowledged that “certainly more staff would help,” but “it wouldn’t eliminate overtime.”
The News’ story pointed out that one problem is that NYCHA schedules its plumbers for weekday shifts, so any work after-hours or on weekends leads to overtime pay.
Councilman Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn) wondered why NYCHA couldn’t rearrange workers’ schedules to better manage its limited resources. “There has to be a way we can structure things to bring down overtime costs and get more work done sooner,” he said.
Olatoye blamed the authority’s excessive OT bill on the emergency nature of repairs, which she said often results in evening or weekend jobs. But she stopped short of conceding Lander’s point and, instead, blamed budgeting and the city’s deteriorating public housing stock. “The reliance on plumbers in particular is emergency-based,” she said. “It’s definitely a challenge. Years of diminished budgets in 50-year-old buildings, that helps drive up those overtime costs.”
Because the Housing Authority is now in contract talks with Plumbers Union Local 1, agency officials wouldn’t detail how they plan to reduce OT.
But Olatoye has said she intends to raise the issue of weekend staffing and after-hours work in reference to other NYCHA employees, including maintenance workers who are represented by Teamsters Local 237.
The issue of after-hours work by NYCHA employees surfaced after an NYPD cop shot an unarmed man, Akai Gurley, on Nov. 20 inside a dark stairwell in the Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn. A maintenance worker claimed that no lights were out in the stairwell when she left work at 4:30 p.m. that day, but NYCHA discovered problems with the light the morning after the shooting.
The fatal shooting at the Pink Houses was the centerpiece of Tuesday’s hearing before the council’s public housing committee.
Questioned by committee chairman Ritchie Torres about their oversight of lighting at the Pink Houses, NYCHA officials defended their actions.
They admitted the type of lighting problem in the stairwell where the shooting took place is not considered an emergency, and thus takes an average of 8.9 days to fix.
They also admitted that a superintendent at the Pink Houses put in a request to NYCHA headquarters in October to upgrade the development’s aging lighting system. As of Tuesday — more than two months after that request was made — NYCHA has begun brick work and door replacements but has no current plans to upgrade lights in Pink Houses stairwells. Karen Caldwell, a tenant leader, told the council at Tuesday’s hearing that tenants still feel unsafe at the Pink Houses.
“The issue of safety and security in our buildings is a major issue,” she said.
