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Q&A
Quality of repair work by contractors and NYCHA's verification process
0:55:38
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Council Member Banks questions NYCHA officials about residents' concerns regarding the quality of repair work done by contractors and NYCHA's process for verifying this work.
- NYCHA acknowledges longstanding issues with contractor work quality.
- A new oversight role at the neighborhood level has been implemented to inspect work and manage contracts locally.
- Quality assurance checks are performed on a percentage of contractor work, though not 100% due to volume.
- Council Member Banks expresses that the current measures are insufficient and pushes for a more comprehensive tracking system.
Chris Banks
0:55:38
Okay.
0:55:38
The residents have voiced concerns about the quality of repairs repair work by contractors.
0:55:47
In November 2024, it was reported by the city control that 30% of the residents rated the work performed by contractors as poor, and less than half rated the work performed as good or better.
0:56:03
How does NYCHA obtain feedback from the residents about work performed by the contractors?
Arvind Sohoni
0:56:10
Thanks, council member, for that question.
0:56:11
Say a couple of things to that.
0:56:12
One, that is certainly the case.
0:56:14
We've heard that consistently for years.
0:56:16
Back in 2019, '20 '20 when I first started here, we did a lot of engagement on our transformation plan, what residents are most concerned about.
0:56:23
This came up basically in every single session we had.
0:56:27
In the last year or so, we've actually implemented new policies to do different kind of oversight for vendor work.
0:56:32
So we have a complete new role at the neighborhood level.
0:56:36
So neighborhoods, have 29 of them in the city, sort of local governance.
0:56:40
A new contract manager has actually now been installed to oversee all of those contracts locally.
0:56:45
That means someone is going go out and inspect work to make sure we're not being fleeced by contractors to sort of obviously avoid the issues we had last February.
0:56:53
So that's a completely new process that's come in place in the last twelve months to really enforce the fact that we do have this issue with vendors.
0:56:59
So that sort of on the management side of things, we've changed that.
0:57:02
There are structural issues too with vendors.
0:57:04
We're often forced to take the lowest responsive bidder to contracts, which can in some cases be not the best firm to do that work.
0:57:12
We're not sort of we don't have a ton of wiggle room on that side, but on the management side, we have made a lot of changes in the last year to try and improve that number.
Chris Banks
0:57:19
A straight question.
0:57:20
How is NYCHA generally verifying and assessing the contractor's work?
0:57:27
I think it's a straightforward question.
Arvind Sohoni
0:57:29
Sure.
0:57:29
So a couple of things on this.
0:57:31
So given the volume of in unit contractor work, we're not doing 100% checks on all of that.
0:57:36
We're doing now quality assurance checks on a certain percentage of those.
0:57:39
So if you have a contractor doing, let's say, 20 apartments in one development on floor tiles, we'll have our neighborhood contract manager go check three of them to make sure the work has been done.
0:57:49
That's not going to catch every single instance of a vendor performing poorly, but it's it's gonna catch much more than we have been in the last sort of five, six years.
Chris Banks
0:57:58
Obviously, that's not enough.
0:58:00
Yeah.
0:58:01
What what is the time frame to establish an apparatus or a system where we can accurately track on us assess the work that's being done by the contractors?
Arvind Sohoni
0:58:15
Yeah.
0:58:16
We're happy to engage in that question with you, council member, and with any other members of the committee too.
0:58:19
So we've had this process in place for the last twelve months.
0:58:23
We're happy to engage in sort of a more aggressive effort on this if you think there's there's additional work to do.
0:58:27
But we're always trying to continuously improve these efforts.
0:58:30
We know this has been a huge pain point for residents for a long time.
0:58:33
We've made the first step on it, but it's really not the last step on this either.