Mayor Bloomberg will promise Thursday that the Housing Authority’s scandalous backlog of 340,000 apartment repair orders will be history by year’s end, the Daily News has learned.
The backlog — exposed by The News — has been getting worse, with some 10,000 tenants told they won’t see a repairman until 2014.
On Thursday, Bloomberg and his appointee, NYCHA Chairman John Rhea, will unveil a new system they say will speed the repairs by — for the first time — coordinating the building trades assigned to these jobs, sources familiar with the plan say.
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For years, tenants have put in requests for repairs, only to have the wrong tradesman show up in the wrong order, delaying the fixup for months and sometimes years.
Thousands of frustrated tenants were forced to live with mold, crumbling plaster, broken windows and water leaks while awaiting help from NYCHA, the city’s biggest landlord.
After The News exposed the depth of NYCHA’s repair problems last summer, Rhea vowed to upgrade the system and reverse the slide — a problem he admitted was “getting worse.”
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One source said the new system will make sure the correct tradesperson gets assigned in the correct order and that the agency will follow through to make sure scheduled jobs are done as promised.
NYCHA officials would not discuss details of the plan, which was set to be unveiled at a news conference Thursday.
Sources said as part of the upgraded repair campaign, NYCHA will promise another first — providing tenants with online quarterly updates of the status of repairs.
Last week, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Public Housing Committee Chairwoman Rosie Mendez demanded that NYCHA fix the repair system and make the status of all pending repairs available to tenants online.
