Public Housing Chief Misstated Lead Paint Fact, Investigator Says

The embattled head of the New York City Housing Authority got a key fact wrong about lead paint inspections when she testified under oath at a City Council meeting in December, according to a letter from the city's Department of Investigations.

The authority's chief executive, Shola Olatoye, had been asked by Bronx councilman Ritchie Torres, the then-chairman of the council's public housing committee, whether apartments with children under six had been inspected by workers certified by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. When pressed, she answered yes.  

After the hearing, the commissioner of the Department of Investigations, Mark Peters, had his staff fact-check Olatoye's statement. They compared a list of employees who conducted the inspections with a list of employees who had HUD certification; none of the inspections were performed by certified workers.

"This letter is to inform the City Council of factual errors in that testimony," Peters wrote in a letter to Torres.

To double-check, the investigators interviewed a sample of 86 employees who checked for lead paint and found more than 85 percent denied receiving the HUD course and certificate. 

The course is online and is very brief. But Torres said Olatoye should have given him a correct answer, or at least corrected herself later. 

"Given the weeks of public scrutiny leading up to that hearing about NYCHA's lead safety program, how could you possibly justify not knowing the answer to that question?" he asked in an interview with WNYC.  "It's either deception or dereliction of duty. In either case, it's unconscionable."

In a written statement NYCHA spokesperson Jasmine Blake said, "The Chair was truthful and relied on the facts provided to her.  She was told staff had been trained. We will evaluate DOI's claims to understand their assertions here."

Torres stopped short of calling for Olatoye's resignation, but said he had lost confidence in her.

The testimony came shortly after another report from the Department of Investigations that found Olatoye knowingly certified to HUD that the authority had performed thousands of lead inspections that never took place.

Victor Bach, a long time public housing advocate from the Community Service Society said that NYCHA needed a strong policy strategist as well as a good operations manager and it's hard to get both in one person. 

"Olatoye fills the bill for strategic planning to steer NYCHA's course over the near future," he said, adding that she is "probably the best chair in decades."

But other housing advocates have criticized Olatoye for her handling of lead paint inspections and for boiler break downs over the latest cold spell that left tenants freezing inside cold apartments.

More than 400,000 people live in New York City public housing.