Mayor de Blasio insisted on Thursday that he didn’t cherry pick data when he claimed only 4 kids in public housing tested positive for elevated lead levels — when the number was really more than 200.
Although the mayor had briefing papers showing 202 kids were at risk between 2010 and 2015, Hizzoner claimed he used the lower figure in a November 2016 press conference because of confusđion over which kids should be counted.
“The problem in this whole discussion is there’s never been a single standard,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference in the East Village Thursday when asked about his purposeful choice of numbers, which was reported last week by The Post.
“The federal standard’s changed over time, different laws require different things,” he added. “We’ve all been trying to speak to this without having a common language.”
At the time, the public had just learned through a Department of Investigation report that the New York City Housing Authority stđ¤Ąđopped conducting annual inspections for lead paint from late 2012 through May â2016, âdespite being required to do so by law.
The probe also revealed that then-NYCHA chair Shola Olatoye had falsely asserted to the feds that those inspections were being conducted.
The administration and the Health Department didn’t come clean on the whole universe of impacted kids until this August — when they finally acknowledged that 1,160 children at NYCHA hđ ˇad registered high lead levels since 2012.
The figure ballooned in part because the city in Ję§anuary adopted a lođˇwer threshold of 5 micrograms per deciliter for inspecting apartments associated with high lead levels, which had been recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2012.
The feds required the city to employ the lower figure — down from the 10 microgram level previously used by the Health Department.
The mayor’s defensive explanation came on the same day that he appointed his sanitation commissioner as the city’s first-ever “lead czar,” with the intention of stamping out lead poisoning once and for all.
Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia will stay in herđ currentđ role, but hand off some duties to a deputy while she works to create a roadmap over the next 90 days for reducing lead poisoning cases to zero.
The bulk of those cases, which have dropped significęŚ antly since 2005, occur in private units.
Garcia isn’t the first commissioner under de Blasio to play two roles at once.
In July, School Construction Authority President Lorraine Grillo was named commissioner of the much-maligned Department of Design and Constructionđ.