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Kathryn Garcia frequently touts her administrative talents as reasons for voters to elect her mayor. But a group of tenant-association leaders are calling a foul on her handling of the New York City Housing Authority’s lead-paint crisis when she served as interim NYCHA chief.
In an open letter released before Wednesday’s mayoral debate, six tenant-association presidents warned: “Kathryn Garcia failed our neighbors, families and friends when she had a chance to protect us from the dangers of lead paint poisoning.” So: “If you care about public housing and the health of our children, please do not vote for Kathryn Garcia.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio named then-Sanitation Commissioner Garcia his lead-paint czar in October 2018 as the issue was exploding, then switched her to acting NYCHA chief in February 2019 after reaching a settlement accord with the feds in the suit that exposed horrific neglect of maintenance (and concealment of it) at the agency. But the technocrat still got misled by her new underlings.
As the federal monitor, Bart Schwartz, reported later that year, Garcia misled his team and the City Council on the number of children exposed to potential lead-poisoning (which can permanently damage kids’ brains) and on the pace of lead-paint remediation.
Specifically, that May she left out “material details” about NYCHA’s lead-paint compliance, presenting an overly optimistic projection for the completion of lead tests in some 135,000 apartments — which in fact would take at least two years more than she’d testified.
A few weeks later, Garcia changed her testimony and admitted that NYCHA was “unable to certify its compliance with applicable lead-based paint regulations.”
She was only a bit player in the larger lead-paint scandal, with just a half-year tenure as head of the troubled public housing agency, but it’s still telling that she got tripped up by the agency’s culture of dissembling despite all the warning signs.
Bottom line: Brandishing your credentials as one of de Blasio’s most competent people is asking voters to set their expectations pretty darn low.