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New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., today released an audit finding that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) may be able to address emergency repairs quickly – but makes tenants wait much longer for repairs requiring skill-trades personnel.

“NYCHA does a good job in responding to emergency and urgent situations,” said Thompson, “but when it comes to repairs requiring specialized trades, the wait is much longer.”

Thompson’s office undertook the audit – which can be viewed at www.comptroller.nyc.gov – based on complaints that NYCHA had not responded in a timely fashion to tenant requests for repairs.

NYCHA manages and maintains 343 housing developments consisting of 2,644 residential buildings with nearly 179,000 apartment units that house more than 408,000 residents. NYCHA has 147 management offices, which handle day-to-day operations and report to borough offices, which report to NYCHA’s central office.

Maintenance workers under the direction of management offices perform routine maintenance work. Work that requires a higher degree of specialization – such as plumbing, electrical, or carpentry - is performed by skilled-trades workers, who are organized and supervised by one of the borough offices.

In 2005, NYCHA set up the Central Call Center (CCC) to standardize the handling of tenant maintenance and repair requests and to reduce backlogs and duplication of repair assignments. CCC enables residents to call a central telephone number at all hours to speak with a CCC representative to request and schedule repairs and report emergencies. CCC was initially available to residents of NYCHA developments in Staten Island and Queens in 2005, expanded to Manhattan developments in early 2006, and to Brooklyn and the Bronx by the end of 2007.

The audit, which covered tenant repair requests requiring skilled-trades work between July 1, 2006, through June 30, 2007 (Fiscal Year 2007), revealed that emergency, urgent and routine maintenance tasks were completed promptly, but improvements are needed to address delays in completing tasks requiring skilled-trades personnel.

Skilled-trade work includes work performed by bricklayers, heating plant technicians, electricians, plumbers, plasterers, carpenters, glaziers, painters and contract painters.

Notably, CCC has been effective in scheduling maintenance personnel at times convenient to the tenants, reducing repetition of work assignments because of tenants not being home. For FY 2007, work tickets closed as “Tenant Not Home” (TNH) for Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island, which were connected to CCC at the time, averaged 15 percent of all work tickets for those boroughs. For Brooklyn and Bronx, which were not connected to CCC at the time, an average of 21 percent of all work tickets were closed as TNH.

Also, CCC has been instrumental in improving NYCHA’s timeliness in addressing and resolving tenant repair requests pre- and post-CCC. During FY 2007, NYCHA addressed or completed repair work tickets for Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island developments (all connected to CCC) within an average of 19 days for all maintenance and skilled-trade tasks from the task assignment date. By comparison, work tickets for Brooklyn and Bronx developments (which were not connected to CCC at the time), NYCHA took an average of 74 days to respond or complete assigned tasks.

Based on auditors’ inspections, 109 of the 115 sampled work tickets were completed and the conditions corrected. The six repairs not completed were due to tenants refusing the recommended repair or tenants not being at home when NYCHA personnel visited.

However, Thompson said the higher-than-acceptable rate of TNH closed work tickets and delays in completing skilled-trades tasks indicate that there are still improvements to be made, including the following:

• There were considerable delays in completing skilled-trades tasks necessary to correct or repair defective conditions because of extended wait time between the date a task was assigned and the date the work was started. Of the 115 sampled work tickets, 8 were for emergency conditions, 8 for urgent conditions, and the remaining 99 were for routine maintenance and skilled-trades tasks.

Both the emergency and urgent tickets were resolved within their required timeframes, respectively 24 hours and 48 hours. The 99 routine tickets included 127 sequenced skilled-trade tasks, of which 122 were completed and five were not because the tenant was not home or refused the repair. Of the 122 sequenced skilled-trade tasks completed, 81 were completed within 30 days, meeting NYCHA’s 30-day goal of completing skilled-trade tasks; the other 41 tasks took more than 30 days to complete. Further analysis of the completion of the skilled-trade tasks showed that from assignment date to completion, 14 of the completed tasks took more than 90 days and up to 457 days (for a Contract Paint task) to complete.

• NYCHA personnel did not consistently supervise completion of the repairs. Of 281 work tickets reviewed from 10 sampled developments, 273 were signed and dated by workers as required upon completion. However, only 83 of the 281 tickets were signed by supervisory personnel; the remaining 198 were unsigned by supervisory personnel and there were was no documentation indicating the superintendents’ closeout or sequencing of work tickets.

• NYCHA’s Project Information Management System (PIMS), a computerized ticket tracking, did not have adequate entry controls to ensure that work ticket close dates are actually the dates the ticket was closed. While a work ticket cannot be edited once it is closed, there are insufficient edit checks to prevent back-dating open tickets. A test of the reliability of PIMS data copy provided by NYCHA of 30 open tickets revealed that 24 had been closed and six others remained open. However, three of the closed work tickets were closed in PIMS after August 17, 2007 (the date NYCHA had extracted the data for the auditors), but backdated to an earlier date.

Thompson made six recommendations, including that NYCHA: review and addresses the level of staffing and scheduling of skilled-trades personnel at the borough offices, identify areas requiring improvements, and design measures to decrease wait time; require that all maintenance, skilled-trade, and supervisory personnel sign the worker’s copy of the work ticket; and, ensure that the management offices retain all original work tickets after the completion of repairs as required.

NYCHA agreed with four recommendations and partially agreed with two, noting that these recommendations would be assessed in early 2009 with the implementation of a new property management and maintenance system.

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