AT A BREAKFAST meeting last week, city Housing Authority Chairman John Rhea announced he was pursuing $500 million in federal funds for “desperately needed” roof and brickwork repairs .
He didn’t mention that two years ago, he decided against going after the same pot of money because he didn’t have qualified staff to spend it wisely, the Daily News has learned. During the two-year delay, the backlog of repair requests by NYCHA tenants grew to 338,000. About 10,000 of those repairs aren’t even scheduled until 2014.
Problems got worse, and mold caused by water leaks became a runaway issue that’s making tenants ill, said Marielys Divanne of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation (MIAF), a civic group that first pressed Rhea to get the repair money in late 2010.
“He says he’s going to do it (now), and he said he couldn’t then. What’s the difference?” she asked. “People are suffering .”
Since Mayor Bloomberg appointed him in 2009, Rhea has complained about the federal government cutting funds to his agency. NYCHA, he points out, faces a $65 million annual deficit over the next few years. Yet MIAF has criticized him for failing to pursue all available resources to fix NYCHA’s increasingly decrepit buildings.
Divanne recalled the group met with Rhea and then-Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott on Nov. 19, 2010, to urge NYCHA to go after the millions in federal funds available for roof and brickwork repair through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. During that meeting, according to Divanne, Rhea said NYCHA considered obtaining $300 million for the repairs, but still had other unspent HUD money.
“He said even if they spent the money, they didn’t have the qualified staff to do it. He said he could get millions and millions of dollars from HUD ,” she said.
He repeated this again at a Jan. 18, 2011, meeting . This time Rhea said he’d been in discussions with HUD , but “then he repeated what he said to us at the previous meeting — that they don’t have the staff and systems in place to carry this through,” Divanne said.
Divanne said she was at both meetings and took notes.
Frustrated , MIAF wrote a Sept. 26, 2011, letter to Bloomberg.
“NYCHA seems to lack the capacity to put credible applications together for these desperately needed funds,” they wrote.
The group says neither Rhea nor the mayor followed up . A HUD spokesman said NYCHA ultimately did not apply for the federal money in 2011.
A NYCHA spokeswoman acknowledged Rhea “postponed” pursuing this money while it went about “improving our systems of planning, managing and scoping out capital projects .”
gsmith@nydailynews.com
