A five-and-a-half-hour-long hearing before a City Council committee Tuesday revealed that the heating crisis in public housing this winter stemmed at least in part from long delays in hiring and training enough boiler technicians.
Over the last four years, the New York City Housing Authority lost nearly a third of the boiler technicians it employed to maintain and repair heating systems in public housing developments around the city, housing authority Chairwoman Shola Olatoye testified.
She said about 100 technicians were promoted to higher ranking positions since 2014 and not been replaced. That left the embattled housing authority with around 250 in-house employees struggling to maintain the buildings' aging heating systems as the city was rocked by one of the coldest winters in recent memory.
According to figures presented at the hearing, about 320,000 NYCHA tenants have experienced heat outages at some point since October, meaning that nearly 80 percent of the agency's tenants have gone without heat or hot water for at least some time.
In the past, housing authority officials have blamed aging equipment and low federal funding for the repeated heat outages. But at the hearing, Olatoye admitted that lack of staff contributed to the problem, in large part because the pipeline of replacement workers has stalled.
The last time a civil service exam was administered for boiler technicians was 2015, Olatoye said, and provisional training programs haven't been offered since 2016.
Members of the union representing the technicians, which is responsible for training new hires, said the blame for the empty pipeline lays squarely on the NYCHA's shoulders. Training Director Bertha Aiken told city council members the authority had requested changes to their program starting in 2015, but that they moved very slowly.
"We already have the program, the curriculum's set up and we're going to start in March," Aiken said. "I went ahead and decided to start the training without any further input from them because they were dragging their feet."