Brooklyn Assemblyman Charles Barron ripped into Mayor de Blasio’s troubled Housing Authority boss at a closed-door meeting in Albany Wednesday — calling for her resignation amid a series of debacles.
“You were signing something saying you’re in compliance with doing the lead-paint testing and abatement and you weren’t,” Barron said he told NYCHA chair Shola Olatoye during the meeting with Assembly Democrats from New York City.
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“And that incensed me, and I told her I supported a call for her resignation.”
A city Department of Investigation report in November revealed that Olatoye had falsely certified inspections for lead-paint hazards in roughly 55,000 apartments.
“She said, ‘I’m entitled to my opinion and that they’re doing this and that to deal with the lead-paint issue and they’re testing now,’ ” Barron told The Post.
“I said, ‘It’s not my opinion. It’s a fact that y’all weren’t telling the truth and you blamed your staff and you took no responsibility for it.’ I told her it was all them — ‘their heads were rolling, not yours.’
“I’m not going to sit here for some PR package to rebuild credibility,” he said. “I think there needs to be a change at the top. She should go. She should go.”
The assemblyman called NYCHA “one of the worst managers of property in the city,” adding that people of color have suffered the most from the agency’s mismanagement.
Olatoye was grilled on a host of issues during the meeting, including the recent apartment ceiling collapse in Brooklyn’s Weeksville Gardens complex — which displaced a family of six — and an epidemic of faulty heating equipment that has left some residents in the cold.
“She did not address the family in particular,” said Brooklyn Assemblywoman Tremaine Wright.
“She did ask for us to have that offline because it is specific to an individual and we are trying to talk about the larger issues during this very general meeting for the entire city.”
Olatoye said the collapse was the result of a pipe problem.
“These buildings are just falling apart,” Wright said. “We have not invested properly over the years and now we are trying to play catch-up.”
While fellow Democrats were clearly irritated during and after the meeting, Olatoye tried to spin the sit-down.
“It’s great that the Assembly is so focused on the New York City Housing Authority and that they want to come up with solutions and that’s what we were talking about today,” she told reporters.
“I’ve been very candid about the challenges this agency faces and that includes a capital need of $17 billion . . . and I also was very candid about our response.”
Additional reporting by Danika Fears


