PUBLIC ADVOCATE Bill de Blasio blasted NYCHA Tuesday for neglecting thousands of unresolved repairs, including 14,000 carbon monoxide detector requests that date back years.
“The most urgent repairs are not being made to this day,” de Blasio said outside the Smith Houses in lower Manhattan, where he released data showing more than 3,800 requests that date back to 2009.
De Blasio, who’s running for mayor, said the data he obtained from NYCHA under the public records law raise “serious questions” about the authority’s much-touted vow to eliminate a huge backlog of repairs by next year.
NYCHA claims that since January, it has reduced a backlog of 420,000 to 220,000, but de Blasio said for that to be true, NYCHA employees would have had to eliminate 3,394 repairs each day working seven days a week, 24 hours a day in the first two weeks of the campaign.
“It was simply NYCHA reworking the numbers to make it look like they’re addressing the problem when they’re not,” he said.
A key finding of his report: More than 14,805 requests for carbon monoxide detectors remain open, with some dating as far back as March 2011. On Tuesday, NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback refused to comment.
Tenants told the Daily News that when NYCHA inspectors check apartments each year, if they find that a carbon monoxide detector is missing or not working they require tenants to put in requests for the lifesaving device.
Since 2004, carbon monoxide detectors have been required in all residential buildings.
“They put in tickets for it because they didn’t have any in stock. They’re probably open because they didn’t come back and install them,” said Damaris Reyes, director of Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), an advocacy group that works with hundreds of NYCHA tenants.
On Tuesday, NYCHA’s Stainback said the number of open repairs cited by de Blasio — more than 390,000 — is “down significantly from when they were sent to the public advocate — as is our entire backlog of repairs.”
Meanwhile, NYCHA has a board meeting scheduled for Wednesday, but it’s not clear that it has a board. A law that went into effect July 3 eliminates two full-time board members’ jobs and creates an all-volunteer panel that’s supposed to be appointed by the mayor.
But Mayor Bloomberg has yet to appoint new board members. On Tuesday, his spokeswoman, Julie Wood, said state law allows the current board to vote at Wednesday’s meeting.
Wood said even though the law took effect July 3, the full-time members are still on the city’s payroll.
gsmith@nydailynews.com
