A Letter from the Chair: Supply Management Leadership Changes
Dear NYCHA Colleagues,
As you may know, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer is in the process of auditing NYCHA’s supply and inventory management activities. The preliminary findings of this audit reveal a number of serious deficiencies in our business practices that hamper our ability to provide timely and quality service to NYCHA’s residents.
We thank Comptroller Stringer for conducting this audit and bringing the details about NYCHA’s supply chain and inventory management practices to the forefront. Although there have been improvements to NYCHA’s procurement and central warehousing operations in recent years and there may be particular details in the audit on which we may disagree with the Comptroller’s office, we are in general agreement with his assessment of the state of our inventory controls and management and his primary recommendation that we need a complete overhaul and redesign of NYCHA’s inventory system. As a result, we have already taken a number of immediate actions. We have made several personnel changes in Supply Management’s leadership team and have named Josephine Russo the interim director of Supply Management until a permanent replacement can be identified. We have also suspended all NYCHA business on govdeals.com while we conduct a top to bottom review of the supply management process and have physically secured all of our satellite warehouses to safeguard and ensure tighter control of our inventory.
As NYCHA releases a strategic plan that lays out our vision for how we can protect and preserve public housing for the next generation of New Yorkers, we will have to fundamentally change the way we operate to ensure that employees have the resources to do their jobs to the best of their ability and serve our residents better. We now recognize that those changes must include an overhaul of our supply and inventory practices. We must continue to increase transparency as we change how we operate, and do so in a way that refl ects the values of this administration, our residents and employees.
Thank you for your efforts on behalf of NYCHA and our residents.
Sincerely,
Shola Olatoye & Michael Kelly
