New Lead Inspections Will Cost NYCHA $88M

NEW YORK — The New York City Housing Authority will spend $88 million to inspect about 135,000 apartments for lead paint over a year and a half, officials announced Wednesday. NYCHA says it has awarded a contract worth that much to seven firms who will start the inspections in April as part of the city's sweeping effort to end childhood lead poisoning.

The effort will give NYCHA a full accounting of where lead paint exists in the city's public housing stock, the housing authority says. The inspections will cover all NYCHA apartments where the presence of lead has not been ruled out through previous testing, officials say.

"We are aggressively tackling lead-based paint inspections at NYCHA so we can chart a definitive course to eradicate lead from our residents’ homes," Kathryn Garcia, NYCHA's interim chairwoman and CEO, said in a statement.

The seven firms — Airtek Environmental, Arc Environmental, ATC Group, JLC Environmental, Lew Corporation, The ALC Group and TRC Environmental — will inspect about 5,000 to 7,000 apartments a month, NYCHA says.

The work will start at the Harlem River and Williamsburg Houses, the first two developments where NYCHA must abate lead paint under the sweeping oversight deal it reached last month with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to the housing authority.

Complexes housing the largest numbers of kids younger than 6 — the ages at which they're most at risk for lead poisoning — will then take priority, NYCHA said. The contract for the work lasts through September 2020, the authority said.

The inspectors will use so-called X-ray fluorescence technology to perform the tests, NYCHA says. Devices with the technology take a reading of the paint and instantly tell whether lead is present, NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said, adding that NYCHA and the Department of Health use such devices.

Any chipped or broken paint that poses an immediate risk will be remediated, Blake said. Unchipped paint that contains lead will be left alone, as it does not pose a hazard, but remediated if chips are found in future inspections, according to Blake.

The sweeping inspection effort is NYCHA's latest response to the concerns about lead that have bedeviled the authority for more than a year. More than 2,000 kids living in public housing were found with elevated levels of the toxic chemical in their blood from 2010 through June 2018, according to a city report released last year.

NYCHA said the testing goes beyond HUD's current policies. The housing authority's agreement with the feds also sets strict deadlines for NYCHA to address lead paint where it exists.

NYCHA said it is also working to hire contractors who will provide "quality assurance" services to make sure the tests are being done properly. The housing authority said it issued a request for proposals for that work in December and is currently reviewing proposals and bids.