ACS's Leaky Justification

The financial reasons given by the Bloomberg administration for closing the Lucille Murray Day-Care Center grow curiouser and curiouser under scrutiny.

The Administration for Children's Services claimed it would cost $650,000 to make needed repairs to the building prior to closing the Bronx center on Jan. 11. But this newspaper's Meredith Kolodner discovered by filing a Freedom of Information Law request that under the lease the city's liability for repairs and improvements to the building is capped at $347,335.

There is a real question as to whether the city would have had to pay even that much, given the fact that the biggest repair item identified - a leaky roof - is the landlord's financial responsibility. The sole outstanding building violation concerns the elevator - which the landlord is also obliged to fix.

This makes it entirely plausible that the city will spend more money on the vacant center - since it is still required to pay $272,000 rent on the building until early fall under the terms of the lease - than it would have on whatever repairs were its responsibility. That makes the cost justification even harder to understand than the other factor cited - that because a previous center director had mishandled its finances, there was no point in continuing operations under new management.

Union officials have heard rumors that city officials want to use the building for a charter school. If that's true, it would have been wiser for ACS to say so, since whatever reason was given there was bound to be unhappiness among both workers who have been displaced and the families of the children who now have to find a new center. All that the fuzzy math and tall tales about repair costs accomplishes is to damage the agency's credibility.