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Mayor Vows to ‘Eradicate’ Lead From City Housing Projects

NEW YORK — A day after announcing a vast new inspection plan for lead in New York City public housing, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday doubled down on his administration’s commitment, vowing to “eradicate this problem once and for all.”

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By
J. David Goodman
, New York Times

NEW YORK — A day after announcing a vast new inspection plan for lead in New York City public housing, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday doubled down on his administration’s commitment, vowing to “eradicate this problem once and for all.”

He said private contractors using specialized equipment would conduct inspections of every public housing apartment where lead paint might have been used — some 130,000 units — in order to create a database of those that contain lead paint and those that do not.

The effort, which would cost at least $80 million and occupy much of the remainder of his tenure in office, significantly broadened the number of apartments that the city has said potentially contain problematic conditions, and added to the significant tasks facing the housing authority, which is strapped for cash and has an estimated $32 billion in needed repairs.

The announcement capped what had been months of shifting descriptions from City Hall of the problem’s scope — the previous estimate for the maximum number of apartments that could contain lead paint was about 50,000 — and an array of escalating responses by the city.

It came a month after de Blasio and federal prosecutors reached an agreement over the false filings that will soon result in a court-appointed monitor for the New York City Housing Authority, which is funded by the federal government but managed by city-appointed officials.

“When it’s done, we will have a perfect view of what’s happening,” de Blasio said of his plan, speaking to reporters in the South Bronx at his first news conference since June 25. “As we have gained more information, it is clear that there is a way to address this that might eradicate the problem once and for all.”

But de Blasio struggled to explain why it had taken more than two years for his administration to undertake this action, given that City Hall has said that the mayor first learned of the false lead certifications filed with the federal government in the spring of 2016.

“When you’re in the middle of, as all of us are, running a whole host of things, it takes a while for some new ideas to develop,” he said, adding that for years there had been little public attention to the problem. “This issue had not been in the public domain.”

De Blasio, for his part, did little to bring attention to the issue. There were no news conferences during 2016 and 2017 about the issue of lead, and no public announcement that the housing authority had restarted inspections of apartments that had lapsed for years, starting late in the Bloomberg administration. (De Blasio did say on Tuesday that the “core mistake” was that the inspections stopped under his predecessor’s watch.) Those checks, which focused on apartments with children under 6 where inspections are required under city law, are now set to be significantly expanded. Inspectors are set to go apartment to apartment to make sure nothing is missed in tens of thousands not previously checked.

In that way, the mayor’s approach resembled one taken by his Democratic predecessor and one-time boss, Mayor David N. Dinkins, when an asbestos crisis broke out in city schools in 1993. Facing re-election, Dinkins ordered emergency inspections of every school. The story was front-page news and added to a narrative about Dinkins, for whom De Blasio worked as a political aide, of poor management that his Republican rival, Rudy Giuliani, exploited in his successful campaign.

“The mayor’s attitude was there are school kids who are at risk, and this didn’t start in my administration, and that we had to do it,” said Norman Steisel, who served as first deputy mayor under Dinkins. “I think he got a lot of kudos for taking the thing on.”

De Blasio on Tuesday said the looming re-election campaign did not explain his lack of public action in 2016 and 2017. “No, of course not,” he said. None of his erstwhile Democratic or Republican rivals mentioned the issue either during that campaign. And it was not an issue when he first ran either, in 2013, de Blasio observed.

“Attention was on some other areas honestly where there were bigger, sharper problems,” he said, describing the atmosphere two years ago. “But now, I think, the good news here is all of our energies and resources are going to go into eradicating this once and for all.”

The new inspection policy comes after the city also acknowledged this month that, using a more stringent measure recommended by the federal government, roughly 800 children had tested positive for lead from 2012 to 2016, about 40 times as many as previously disclosed. The city also disclosed that, six months ago, in January, it quietly began conducting lead checks using the more stringent threshold.

The move was required because of a new federal Department of Housing and Urban Development rule change that went into effect in July 2017. City officials said logistical issues prevented the housing authority from complying until this year.

Maria Doulis, vice president at the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission, said the mayor’s plan to use outside contractors for inspections was an “encouraging sign,” but added that the new spending on inspections would not address underlying management and operational issues at the sprawling housing authority.

Earlier in the day and a few miles south in a Manhattan courtroom, the mayor’s new approach did not go unnoticed, as lawyers for the city and federal prosecutors appeared before a judge who will ultimately have to approve de Blasio’s deal over a monitor.

“In my view there is no case of greater public importance pending before this court as evidenced by the flow of nearly daily revelations,” Judge William H. Pauley III said in his opening remarks, in which he referenced the mayor’s announcement of an expansive new inspections regime.

Pauley has yet to approve the agreement, and said Tuesday that he had concerns over the cost to staff a federal monitor and whether it would add another layer of bureaucracy.

“Every dollar spent on bureaucracy is one less dollar on repairs and systemic reforms,” he said.

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