With wasted public money comes squandered public trust, as the New York City Housing Authority continues to prove despite new leadership installed by a new mayor.
No arm of municipal government is in deeper trouble than the landlord to more than 400,000 residents. More than a decade of neglect and mismanagement plunged many of its 2,600 buildings into severe disrepair while its budget is millions of dollars in the red.
The present occupant of City Hall, Bill de Blasio, promised far better, as did his choice for NYCHA chair, Shola Olatoye.
While Olatoye’s early moves have been encouraging, a Daily News investigation by Greg Smith devastatingly documents that she has yet to take command of critical basics.
NYCHA’s black-hole storerooms epitomize the authority’s dysfunction. As revealed by The News during the Bloomberg administration, they were filled with supplies that had been ordered from somewhere up the bureaucratic chain, placed in a system without inventory controls and left to become useless or be pilfered.
Now NYCHA is closing the circle of incompetence by auctioning a mind-boggling collection at give-away prices. Having hosed taxpayers with unjustifiable purchases, the agency is dumping the never-used items for pennies on the dollar.
Illuminating example: While NYCHA painters needed paint, an inexplicable order went out for black leather Bond Street attaché cases, 110 of which had resided in a storeroom still wrapped.
They retail for $60.89 each at Office World. NYCHA sold them through a government surplus auction website for $6.45 a piece.
Illuminating example: While thousands of NYCHA residents suffered broken doors, a nearly obscene order went out for black acrylic boxes with brass locks that were supposedly to be used as suggestion boxes for ideas to improve NYCHA.
Although Staples sells the boxes for $32.99 each, NYCHA let 338 go for $1.47 a piece.
All told, NYCHA is in the midst of dumping $18.1 million-worth of inventory, also including spiffy office furniture and conference tables, uniforms, tools, sinks and so on and so forth all the way to Rubbermaid cereal containers.
Worse, on visits to the black holes, Controller Scott Stringer’s auditors found that listed items, including air conditioners, have gone missing.
Olatoye must stop the unconscionable waste of taxpayers’ property — and provide credible assurances that NYCHA’s purchasing power will henceforth go to the equipment most urgently needed, and only that.
She was on her way to bolstering confidence that NYCHA was moving toward competent management, the coin of the realm in convincing public and private sources of money to invest in the agency. How she handles this debacle will go a long way to demonstrating whether she has what it takes to build that trust.
