Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday he hasn’t bothered to find out “all the details” of a blistering city comptroller audit that exposed how two city agencies failed to protect 12,000 children from toxic lead.
“I haven’t heard all the details or seen all the details of the report,” the mayor told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer on Friday morning — nearly 24 hours after the damning report’s release.
De Blasio blamed the lapse on an outdated legal standard.
“The law was different and that law was followed,” de Blasio said.
The Health Department didn’t alert the city’s tenant watchdog — the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — that 11,972 children tested positive for lead levels that the feds consider dangerous between 2013 and 2018 because of an out-of-date regulation.
Under city rules, children were only considered poisoned if lead levels in their blood hit 15 micrograms per deciliter. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined in 2012 that the level should be just 5 micrograms — a change the city did not make until last year.
Under questioning, the mayor attempted to pivot to a lead plan he rolled out in January after spending months under fire for mishandling another lead crisis — in public housing.
“We’re now going beyond what the law requires and are going to investigate even more intensively,” he claimed.
But the mayor wasn’t able to tell Lehrer how many of the 10,000 private homes that housed lead-poisoned kids still need to be inspected by HPD.
“I don’t know it right this minute but I’ll know it today,” he said.