Letters to the Editor
HA Should Rethink Job Cuts

To the Editor:

It was recently reported that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is facing a $225-million shortfall, due to brutal cuts in funding from Washington, as yet more funds are directed away from social programs to the war.

Tino Hernandez, Chairman of the NYCHA, has proposed various stopgap solutions, including laying off up to 500 employees on top of the downsizing of staff already enacted over the past several years, diverting $100 million from capital improvement to operations/maintenance, and selling off NYCHA property (which was rightly criticized at the City Council).

Douglas Apple, NYCHA General Manager, has candidly spoken of cuts in already threadbare maintenance and services. But what neither has spoken about is taking any money from the three-year-old costly Construction Management (CM) program, and this needs to change.

The problem is that the CM program is costing the Authority tens of millions of dollars, and to date, it has produced no statistical evidence that the CM projects are coming in on time or on budget. For the NYCHA staff in DC 37 Local 375 Technical Guild who work on capital improvement projects, the CM firms are just another wasteful layer of bureaucracy.

And the cost is staggering. CM projects routinely cost 25 percent to 100 percent or even more than those projects conventionally bid under Wicks Law public bidding jobs. For example, the elevator replacement project at Ingersoll Houses in Brooklyn was estimated to cost $15.1 million dollars by the NYCHA estimators; the CM firm bid $33 million! Replacing the entrances at Albany Houses in Brooklyn was estimated to cost about $6 million if bid conventionally, and $8 million if built under the CM program. Those are only two examples, and in spite of that, the program has grown from five firms initially to seven to nine and now to 12.

The CM / Build program was initiated in the Capital Projects Division by the Housing Authority as part of an overall reorganization over three years ago [The "reorg," formulated without any staff input, has proven to be a disaster and the Authority's administration is now moving to correct it, picking up suggestions made by the rank-and-file employees four years ago.] The CM/Build program was supposed to be a "pilot" program to improve the on-time construction completion rate of capital projects, then at only about 40 percent and to improve the quality of contractors hired to perform the work from a pre-approved list.

Amazingly, the CM firms were originally not subject to public oversight! It was the Authority's policy for three years under former Deputy General Manger Joseph Farro that the agency's in-house Inspectors were "forbidden" to inspect the CM / Build construction projects. Now, under Louie Rueda, Farro's replacement, the Authority is belatedly deploying NYCHA Construction Inspectors on the CM-controlled jobs along with the CM's own inspectors. That is a redundant service coming at a high cost to the taxpayers in a time when every dollar counts and needs to be accounted for.

The CM Inspectors' cost to the Authority is about $180,000 on a full-time yearly basis, as compared to NYCHA's own in-house Inspector's average cost of $75,000 (includes salary and benefits).

The CM program, apparently instituted more for the benefit of a few private firms, is a severe misdirection of funds which are desperately needed elsewhere by the residents and the staff.

To date, more than $100 million has been awarded to the CM firms for services that could have been provided for by the Authority's experienced in-house staff at a much-cheaper cost. The money going to the CM firms is money taken away from community center construction and upgrades, where kids can go to day care and do their homework, teenagers can play basketball and get computer skills, and senior residents can relax together and take classes. It's money taken away from broken doors and intercoms needed for security. It's money taken away from hiring (never mind laying off) staff to upkeep the developments. It's money needed to preserve the last block of low-income housing in a city battered by gentrification, rampant condo over-development and astronomical rents.

It's not surprising that NYCHA hasn't documented whether the CM program is meeting its stated goals of increasing on-time and on-budget efficiency. It's another form of privatization, and privatization, wherever we see it - in public education, transportation, housing, or health care - virtually always leads to less service at greater cost.

The highly experienced, educated, trained and seasoned professionals of the NYCHA are more than capable of handling the majority of the construction design, construction management and inspection oversight services. The myth that the private sector can accomplish things more efficiently is just that - a myth. Study after study shows that trained civil servants provide public service more effectively, more efficiently and more cheaply than private contractors who are dedicated only to their bottom line: profits.

This is not the only example of NYCHA's misallocation of funds. It was reported by resident representatives at the City Council last fall that the Authority spends a huge amount on legal staff pursuing over 16,000 frivolous evictions a year for late rent payments (defined as more than five days into the month more than three times a year, which would never happen in private housing). In Capital Improvements, projects are started and then dropped halfway through. A full audit of NYCHA is long overdue.

The CM/Build program is a truly egregious example of management's blind faith in private-sector efficiency that is costing the taxpayers millions of dollars while services go waiting, needed staff are let go and remaining staff are forced to try and provide basic maintenance with less than a skeleton crew. Yes, the cuts in funding are real. Because of many operating budget shortfalls over the years, tens of millions of dollars of capital funds have been siphoned away from being utilized for the improvement and modernization of critically needed Authority housing infrastructure. The $100 million currently being moved from the Capital Budget to the Operating Budget, when added to the more-than $100 million already wasted on the three year old CM/Build program, totals $200 million that could have been invested directly into housing infrastructure but instead will be lost forever!

All this is a part of an on-going shredding of the safety net and reversing the gains of struggles it took working people and unions generations to accomplish. Public housing has been under attack nationally for decades, despite the failure of private developers to provide anything resembling affordable housing. Congress is clearly more concerned with pursuing a useless war than providing shelter for people at home.

But the NYCHA administration, for all its lamenting of the cuts, continues to misdirect millions to private contractors, making the worst of a bad situation, and they need to be held accountable. The City Council, New York State's Authority Oversight Committee in Albany and HUD need to examine this in detail and put a stop to all the unnecessary and unaffordable privatization, waste and mismanagement.

CLAUDE FORT, JON FORSTER, MICHELLE KELLER, MITCHELL FEDER, JOSHUA BARNETT and ALLENSON MOORE

Editor's note: Mr. Fort is president of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375 of District Council 37. Mr. Forster is the local's first vice president; Ms. Keller its second vice president. Mr. Feder is president of the Guild's Housing Authority chapter and Mssrs. Barnett and Moore are vice presidents of the chapter.