Graham Horn of NYLAG testifies in support of CityFHEPS transparency bills

Good afternoon.

Thank you for this opportunity to testify.

My name is Graham Horn.

I'm here from New York Legal Assistance Group.

I'm honored to stand with and learn from our FHC members who live this reality that some of us work in.

They live it every day.

And I am...

Really grateful that the commissioner is here as well.

Our written testimony will follow with more detail, but it is forged in partnership with our shelter and economic stability project and our tenants'rights public housing unit, who have come together to support

all of these bills, these intros, as efforts towards improving the administration and effectiveness of city FEPS, as many of the speakers today so far have suggested as

first steps or second steps or many in a sequence of never-ending steps that we are excited to continue to be a part of.

Transparency is deeply needed at all.

levels across the city FEPS system and a client of ours, Miss G, and her young child submitted three years of city FEPS renewals

without the subsidy ever changing and now are 17,000 in arrears and facing eviction from a city FEPS funded apartment.

I was, I was

really excited to hear about the October-ish coming of an online platform that will allow

participants in the CityFabs program to look and see what's going on, to see if those changes have been accepted or the payments have been issued in the proper amount.

I think that is deeply needed and a great step forward.

A few notes on some of the intros in more detail in the written testimony, but Intro 98, we fully support, ask that it require specific timelines for inspections and re-inspections because that

interstitial time can be really dangerous.

Additionally, in eviction prevention cases, housing attorneys are already responsible for the repair section.

So there should be...

We need to start to wrap up.

Go ahead.

Yeah, please.

I'll submit it all.

All right.

Thank you so much.