Audit Report On The Efforts Of The New York City Housing Authority To Inspect, Maintain, And Repair Passenger Elevators

This audit determined the adequacy of the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) efforts to inspect, maintain, and repair passenger elevators.

NYCHA is the largest public housing authority in the United States. Its mission is to provide decent and affordable housing in a safe and secure living environment for low- and moderate-income City residents. NYCHA manages and maintains 334 housing developments consisting of 2,604 residential buildings with nearly 179,000 apartment units that house more than 403,000 authorized residents. It operates more than 3,300 elevators in 283 of its developments citywide, 40 of which are developments only for senior citizens. The elevators are installed in approximately 1,700 buildings of generally five or more stories.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

The audit determined that NYCHA’s efforts to carry out elevator inspections are generally adequate; however, its efforts to address elevator maintenance and repairs need improvement.

NYCHA performed all required elevator inspections and tests for all 57 elevators observed at the sampled developments. Nevertheless, certain weaknesses were disclosed, including that NYCHA needs to ensure that all inspections and tests are performed promptly and appropriately documented, and that cited deficiencies are promptly addressed.

NYCHA’s preventive maintenance of elevators is inadequate. The audit disclosed that more than 40 percent of PM tasks scheduled for the sampled elevators during the period November 2008 through October 2009 were not performed, based on preventive maintenance (PM) checklists maintained by each development. With regard to repairs, NYCHA reported that in fiscal year 2009 it fell a little short of its performance indicator of “10 average hours to resolve elevator outages.” Our time study of outages for sampled elevators during the first six months of fiscal year 2010 (July 2009 through December 2009) showed that NYCHA took an average of 13.8 hours to resolve these outages. When looking at the actual time to resolve them, we found that almost one-third (32%) of these outages were not resolved within 10 hours. Further, based on a number of weaknesses in how data is collected and reported, NYCHA management cannot directly rely on its primary reports to assess elevator performance and outages or to measure the effectiveness of its repair and maintenance activities.

Audit Recommendations

To address these weaknesses the audit made eight recommendations, including that NYCHA should:

• Continue to assess and identify areas where efficiencies and improvements can made in responding to and resolving elevator outages.

• Ensure that required PM work is performed and that all such work is appropriately supported by PM schedules (checklists) that are completed by the work teams and kept on file at each development as required and recorded in Maximo (computer system).

• Document instances of and justifications for not performing scheduled PM work. These reports should be approved by a supervisor and communicated to the Elevator Bureau Borough Administrators, who should also be notified of all instances in which PM work is not performed. Repeated periods of PM nonperformance should be investigated and corrective action taken.

• Continue to work to correct and enhance management reporting deficiencies to ensure that internal and published performance indicators and measures are accurately reported.

In their response, NYCHA officials generally agreed with the audit’s recommendations but argued that one of them could not be implemented at this time.