Text Size

Email Post

Print Post

Comments (1)

Save Article

New York, NY - More than a dozen members of the New York Housing Authority's elevator staff - including the official who directs all safety inspections - also work second jobs for private companies in the elevator industry.

The employees, including three managers and nearly half the inspection staff, say their second jobs do not conflict with their duties maintaining the 3,300 elevators in the authority's 2,600 buildings.

Tenant complaints and inspection records indicate that the authority's elevators are among the worst maintained in the city.

All of the elevator staff members with second jobs, including the chief inspection official, Charles Miraglia, have received a waiver from the city's Conflicts of Interest Board, which ruled the second jobs did not present an ethical conflict. Each waiver was granted, the board said, based on the endorsement of the Housing Authority chairman, Tino Hernandez, and an assurance from the employee that the job would not interfere with his authority duties.

Howard Marder, a spokesman for the authority, said that it was up to the employee's department head to ensure that city time and resources were not used for outside employment and that the second job would not hinder the employee's performance with the authority. Only then, Mr. Marder said in a written response to questions, does the authority chairman give his approval.

"City employees have the right to have outside employment provided it does not conflict with their city job duties," Mr. Marder wrote.

No evidence has emerged suggesting the employees have done private work on city time. But the moonlighting within the elevator department has drawn the interest of the city's Department of Investigation.

Criticism of the way the authority, the nation's largest public housing landlord, maintains its elevators intensified recently, have come since the Aug. 19 death of Jacob Neuman, a 5-year-old boy who tried to escape from a stalled elevator and fell 10 stories down an elevator shaft at the Taylor-Wythe complex in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn district attorney's office continues to investigate that accident.

Diane Struzzi, a spokesman for the agency, said investigators were examining "several open cases on this very issue." She declined to elaborate, and would not identify anyone individually.