New York City Housing Board to Add Tenants Representatives and Cut Positions
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: July 4, 2013
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is remaking the board of the New York City Housing Authority, eliminating its highly paid full-time positions, adding more tenant representation and keeping the mayor’s office in control.
Under a state measure sought by Mr. Bloomberg, the board will expand to seven members from four. It is to include three tenant representatives, instead of one, and will no longer have two full-time positions that each pay $187,100 and come with a car and driver.
The measure was approved by the State Legislature and signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo this week.
Under the new law, only the board chairman keeps a full-time salary — $197,300 — while other members will receive a stipend of up to $1,500 a month, depending on hours worked. And the terms for all members except the chairman, who serves at the pleasure of the mayor, would be three years, down from five years for some of them.
Mr. Bloomberg had sought to overhaul the board after a study commissioned by the city found that the authority performed poorly compared with some of its counterparts in other American cities.
The authority oversees 334 housing developments with more than 400,000 tenants. It has suffered from federal budget cuts and management problems, most notably a years-long backlog of repairs.
Some watchdogs said the change in the board could help address what they described as managerial dysfunction that has hampered the authority’s ability to address its financial problems.
A report last year from the office of the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, said an overhaul should allow for “a broader set of perspectives, eliminate patronage, increase accountability and strengthen the linkage” between the board and “this complex, multibillion-dollar organization.”
Supporters of an overhaul said the changes bring the board closer to a traditional model in which members set policy and are not directly involved in operations, as some board members had been. They said this structure created competing turfs and confusion about the board’s priorities.
Adding more tenant members, they said, ensures that the perspectives of the authority’s residents will be better represented.
“Residents of public housing need to have more say in what’s going on,” said Keith L. T. Wright, a Democrat from Harlem who sponsored the legislation in the Assembly, where he chairs the Housing Committee. “This is a better dynamic, and the people will have more faith and trust in the Housing Authority’s decision-makers.”
In a statement, Mr. Bloomberg praised the legislation for streamlining management of the Housing Authority and “ensuring a more diverse range of views.”
But Reginald H. Bowman, who chairs the Citywide Council of Presidents, a group that represents residents, said that while the changes improve on an “archaic structure,” they do not go far enough.
He said the residents should have more seats on the board.
“We should be the majority voting power since we’re the people governed by it,” Mr. Bowman said.
Of the legislation, he added, “The mayor wins because the mayor controls the board.”
The mayor appoints all board members but, except for the chair, can remove them only for cause. Under the legislation, Mr. Bloomberg, who as mayor will continue to appoint the board members, had sought the power to remove appointees without cause.
But the bill that was approved said the board’s chair would serve at the mayor’s pleasure, as always. For the others, the mayor must publicly state reasons for firing them.
Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat and a member of the Assembly’s Housing Committee who voted for the bill, said the board still needs more checks to ensure transparency. Most recently, the Housing Authority has come under fire for a revenue-raising plan that envisions leasing vacant land within public housing for private development.
“There are basic questions about how they make decisions and interact with the public,” Mr. Kavanagh said.
Housing officials maintain that their more critical problem is a steady drop in federal funding that has left the authority with an annual operating deficit of $60 million, as well as billions of dollars in unfinanced repairs and capital improvements for more than 178,000 apartments.
Those reductions have deepened because of automatic cuts to the federal budget, known as the sequestration. City officials last week made up for $58 million of the more than $200 million in federal cuts in the new fiscal year’s budget, and will have other city agencies absorb some services to avert elimination of programs and layoffs at the authority.
Authority officials said in a statement that they anticipate fewer layoffs because of the city allocation. But still faced with nearly $150 million in cuts, they said in a written statement, the agency “must proceed with difficult decisions to balance our budget.”
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