Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday refused to admit that his administration has been repeatedly low-balling the number of kids living in New York City Housing Authority apartments with elevated blood lead levels — instead asserting that the media wasn’t telling the full story.
Asked about the latest upward revision of the number of kids impacted since 2012 to 1,160 — a number that blared from the front covers of both city tabloids on Friday — Hizzoner insisted that his administration had never lied about the extent of harm done.
“That’s just not accurate. And I don’t think New Yorkers believe that every tabloid’s cover tells them the whole story,” he told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer.
He also shifted blamed to predecessor Mike Bloomberg’s administration.
“And obviously, very, very sadly, had the lead inspections continued as they were supposed to in the previous administration we would not be having this conversation. And I think that really needs to be recognized here,” de Blasio said.
Last November, city officials put out a fact sheet that claimed only 17 children under the age of 6 living in NYCHA had registered high blood lead levels between 2010 and 2016. Soon after they revised that number up to 19 cases.
What they didn’t acknowledge at the time was that they were only counting cases that met the city’s looser standard for elevated lead — of 10 micrograms per deciliter — rather than the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended threshold of 5 micrograms.
Federal housing officials required NYCHA to start implementing the lower threshold starting in July 2017, but city officials delayed using that marker until January 2018.
City officials had also excluded from their count children living in NYCHA units where findings of lead paint by the Department of Health had been successfully challenged by NYCHA — even though those kids had indisputably measured high levels of lead in their blood.
Asked about the city’s delay in implementing the lower threshold, de Blasio insisted it was because the CDC had merely made a recommendation rather than a mandate.
“That’s also, respectfully, that’s not the whole truth,” he told WNYC. “Because the CDC did not instruct, it provided guidance, but it did not instruct localities to implement that.”
In July, city officials finally admitted the number of cases of kids under 6 who had registered blood lead levels between 5 and 9 micrograms from 2012 to 2016 was 820.
That equated with 758 children because of kids who were tested in multiple years.
Only on Thursday did the city finally provide the full tally of kids under 18 living in NYCHA who had registered high blood lead levels between 2012 to June 2018: 1,160.
The only reason the issue came to light was because of a Department of Investigation report in November that revealed that NYCHA had stopped conducting required annual inspections of its apartments for lead hazards from August 2012 through May 2016.
During those years, NYCHA officials falsely asserted to the federal government that the inspections had continued.
Hizzoner has repeatedly blamed the administration of his predecessor, Bloomberg, for halting those inspections.
But he completely let former NYCHA chair Shola Olatoye off the hook for not catching the lapse sooner, and for continuing to falsely assert to the feds that the inspections were happening even after she learned in April 2016 that they weren’t.
Olatoye resigned earlier this year.
