Council Member Narcisse on staffing failures and building posting requirements

Thank you, Councilmember Narcisse.

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Commissioner and your team for being here.

And thank you, Chair and Madam Speaker.

What we have seen in Harlem, we did not learn.

All what we do as medical professional, which you're a doctor, it's, I don't want anyone to die on my shift.

That's what I would say all the time in the ER.

No one should die, right?

So I know you not taking it lightly because as a physician and your team is to prevent.

But what I don't understand, why that...

We had shorter staff, and I heard it from my colleagues as well.

So why we never address that?

Because we did not learn, and our whole life is to prevent.

We did not learn from what took place in Harlem to make preventative approach to prevent people from dying.

That's what bothers me.

And I think we need to do much more than that.

And I heard it from the speaker and, of course, from my colleagues.

But I have some suggestions and some bills that maybe, because local

law 159 requires building owners to test their cooling towers for Les Journées every 30.

one days and disinfect them during the summer month.

But that information go up.

So now we posted an elevator inspection certificate where everyone can see that.

So we post restaurant letters, grades and everything.

Why we not doing that in a building to let folks know when

the building been tested and what's the result?

Because people want to take charge of their health.

Am I correct?

Yeah.

So first let me respond to the piece around staffing.

I disagree with your assertion, Councilmember.

We do have 56 total budgeted positions for these water ecologists.

50 of them are filled at this moment.

So we do have six staff that we're hoping to bring in.

And if you have recommendations, we would love to have the right person in one of those slots.

Now, to talk about your idea, I think there's absolutely merit to your idea.

And I think we should consider, we should follow up and talk about the details of that.

You see what we're doing with regard to transparency is moving in the direction that you're describing, right, with the revamping and relaunching of our public website so individuals

can put their address in and get a mapped feature of how their tower compares to others in their building with regard to Legionella sampling and Legionella history.

So I think that there's certainly...

conversation we had around this.

Yeah, I would like to see it.

I put the bill in and I would like to see it happen because people need to take one more question.

What is the average cost to clean a cooling tower?

And what is the average cost to disinfect a cooling tower?

And what factors this cost?

Yeah, that can depend on a whole range of factors, but it's in the thousands of dollars to clean a cooling tower.

Okay, thank you.

We're running out of time.

I have more questions, but we need to make sure that we hire those folks.

And we have 51 council members.

You can send it to us, and we can promote it.

So make sure that we have enough staffing so we can not say sorry to those that lost their life and their families.

Thank you.