A promise to save the cash-strapped public housing authority millions by shifting dozens of NYCHA bureaucrats onto the city payroll has fallen apart.
NYCHA claimed it would save $94 million a year by transferring command center workers who field repair requests over to the city 311 system.
That was supposed to save $320 million through 2020, then $94 million a year after that.
This week, NYCHA drastically reduced its estimates, now predicting $111 million in savings through 2020 and a much smaller $39 million a year after that.
The chairman of the City Council’s Public Housing Committee, Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx), said the original prediction was fiction and they knew it.
Early last year, a top NYCHA official told him the 311 system wasn’t set up to handle the hundreds of repair requests that flood the agency’s command center every day.
Torres, who plans to question NYCHA chairwoman Shola Olatoye about this Thursday at a council budget hearing, now says the housing agency’s overhaul plan, called NextGen NYCHA, is based on “dubious assumptions.”
NYCHA “made a promise it knew it could not keep. The credibility of NextGen is eroded by NYCHA’s carelessness with revenue projections,” he said.
Late Wednesday a NYCHA spokeswoman said, “After decades of deficits, NYCHA is anticipating ending a second consecutive year with a surplus—in part, because of $24 million in savings from greater than projected reductions in central office costs attributable to employee attrition and integration. Integration of the CCC is complex and an ongoing focus of our NextGen implementation over the next ten years. Today marks year one of the 10 year effort.”
