Insane bureaucrats

Asbestos flub costs Co-op City tenants $20M

By CANDICE M. GIOVE

Is the city sniffing glue?

In 2005, a city Department of Environmental Protection inspector took a tile from a vacant Co-op City apartment to a lab for testing. A trace of asbestos was discovered in the 40-year-old adhesive.

The city ordered a massive asbestos abatement and reflooring of the complex’s 15,372 apartments at a cost of $20 million to tenants.

But the remediation has been a waste of money, according to a lawsuit being filed tomorrow in Bronx state Supreme Court on behalf of the 55,000 co-op owners.

They claim 86,000 air tests conducted so far show no airborne asbestos before, during or after flooring work. They blame the phony scare on overzealous city inspectors and want their money back.

“All of the facilities in New York City have this glue. All of the Mitchell-Lama developments have this kind of glue, and nothing is [airborne] and no one else is being forced to pay,” said former Assemblyman Stephen Kaufman, the attorney representing the tenants’ RiverBay Corp. in the suit against the city and the DEP. “It is absolutely Alice and Wonderland-ish.”

The asbestos precautions and testing cost $4 million annually, which translates into a 4 percent maintenance increase for each owner, the plaintiffs claim. The suit demands that Co-op City’s apartments no longer be subject to asbestos-abatement mandates and seeks unspecified damages.

Since the remediation order, the one-man job of replacing tiles in an apartment became a production requiring a half-dozen specialists dressed head-to-toe in blue hazmat suits, with decontamination tents set up in the basements of the 35-building complex.

During a tour of a flooring and asbestos-abatement job on the 21st floor of a Baychester Avenue building last week, abatement specialists lined an entire hallway with equipment and a separate environmental specialist managed the site.

The workers prepped by duct-taping double layers of plastic sheeting along a hallway’s wall. The setup alone took an hour. What would have been small, $300 tiling jobs have become $4,000 hours-long affairs, according to RiverBay’s Kevin Keenan, who oversees all of the abatement projects.

Asbestos expert John Lange and former city DEP Commissioner Joel Miele, commissioned by RiverBay as consultants, agreed that the asbestos-abatement measures were unnecessary.

And Keenan said no maintenance worker in the history of Co-op City has ever been sick from tile exposure.

“In the 40 years we’ve been working here, we’ve had no issues of anyone being hospitalized or sick from asbestosis or mesophelioma,” he said. “It’s not a health issue, but the city still puts these regulations on us.”