A major rehab effort failed to fix the roof of a building at a Brooklyn housing development, but NYCHA still signed off on the job as complete — just one of many failures noted in a city audit to be released Monday.
So when it rained this past Nov. 30, about 5 inches of water pooled on the roof of Building Five at the Lafayette Houses in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The pooling, which remained two days later, can cause leaks, and it’s just the type of problem the rehab of all roofs in the Brooklyn development was supposed to address.
City Controller Scott Stringer’s audit describes a pattern of ineptitude in NYCHA’s struggle to repair its aging buildings. Of NYCHA’s 320 developments, 270 are more than 30 years old and 114 were built before 1967. Lafayette, for example, opened in 1962, the year John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
NYCHA had no record of inspecting the failed Lafayette job. And by then it was too late to do anything about it — the warranty with the contractor had lapsed.
Examining $1 billion in NYCHA repair contracts bid from January 2013 through November 2015, Stringer’s auditors found NYCHA did a haphazard job of monitoring what it paid for.
In some cases, taxpayers wound up paying for work that wasn’t finished or was inadequate and shouldn’t have been approved, the audit found. In three of eight sampled developments, rehab work was completed between 23 and 60 days late.
“Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers depend on NYCHA to competently fix its buildings,” Stringer said. “NYCHA needs to be more diligent to ensure that work is done properly.”
NYCHA spokeswoman Zodet Negron defended the agency.
“We are aggressively confronting the challenges of aging infrastructure and federal disinvestment,” Negron said.
“Our capital-planning strategy is leading to real progress and results, including strengthening construction project management, updating our procedures, training staff and implementing new tools and initiatives to deliver timely, quality projects.”
The Lafayette complex was emblematic of this lack of oversight, the auditors claimed.
Lafayette was part of a $300 million, three-year effort by Mayor de Blasio to fix roofs throughout public housing. NYCHA paid Universal Construction Resources $10.9 million to rehab roofs on all seven Lafayette buildings.
After the November rainstorm, Stringer’s auditors randomly checked Building Five and found the pooled water. Two days later they found it was still there, contrary to industry standards that require water to drain completely within 48 hours.
Stringer’s team also found minor ponding on the roofs of several other NYCHA developments that had been certified as repaired, including the Sumner Houses in Brooklyn, King Towers in Manhattan and South Beach Houses in Staten Island.
Stringer estimated the value of the defective work on that one Lafayette roof at $5,000, but noted, “If the condition is left unaddressed, it will jeopardize NYCHA’s $180,000 investment in the roof of Building Five.”
“NYCHA should have rejected this work,” the auditors wrote. “Unfortunately, NYCHA failed to identify the deficiency during construction even though the staining would likely have been present prior to the formal acceptance of the roof by NYCHA.”
NYCHA could provide no proof that it had actually inspected the work on Building Five roof two years after the repair was completed, even though the warranty required semiannual inspections.
And because NYCHA didn’t identify the problem within the one-year warranty, the taxpayers are on the hook for the lousy repair job.
NYCHA disagreed with the audit’s findings, claiming it did its own test later on Building Five’s roof after another rainstorm and found no pooling.
Stringer also found greenish-yellow growth on a concrete exterior facade newly installed at the East 152nd St.-Courtlandt Ave. development near Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx.
The auditors said the stain — likely mold or lichen — had sprouted on the new block not long after NYCHA signed off on the job. They noted it could “cause deterioration of the facade block and pose a health risk to residents.”
NYCHA said it was looking into the cause of the staining.
And the auditors found NYCHA was forced to substantially hike a contract to fix roofs at Sumner Houses in Bushwick, Brooklyn, even before work began there.
NYCHA picked Pioneer General Contracting by competitive bidding to do the work, but a month before the job started, NYCHA suddenly hiked the contract $2.17 million to $9.81 million.
The amount was later trimmed lightly, but the sudden change wound up costing NYCHA $1.73 million more than originally budgeted.
Stringer said the added cost to taxpayers occurred because NYCHA failed to include in its original proposal work it should have known was part of the job — the demolition of 24 chimneys and a number of what they called “smoke rooms” on the roofs of the development’s 13 buildings.
Stringer found that this sudden spike “suggests the contract’s original work scope was inadequate to address conditions that likely existed at the time the contract was bid.”
Pioneer did the work at the inflated price but wound up suing NYCHA for even more money. That suit is pending.
