NYCHA general manager Vito Mustaciuolo cashed out his unused vacation for many years and raised his salary to $515,000—more than the mayor and governor combined. At the same time, the pandemic’s work stoppage did not stop his staff’s overtime pay from rising.

Newly released data shows that the executive who manages the city's troubled Housing Authority topped the list of civil servants with a salary of $515,000 last year, more than any other municipal employee.

NYCHA General Manager and Chief Operating Officer Vito Mustaciuolo received more than the sum of the mayor and governor’s salaries in fiscal 2021. This is an unusual arrangement that allows him to spend much more vacation than is usually allowed. Cash it out.

Mayor Bill de Blasio asked Mustaciuolo to serve as NYCHA's general manager in 2018 and to be transferred from the position of a senior official in the Department of Housing Protection and Development. At that time, the department only allowed employees to cash in 261 unused holidays, while NYCHA only accepted 54 days of transfers.

But Mustaciuolo said that he would only accept a job from NYCHA if he was paid for every unused vacation he had accumulated on the city's payroll for 39 years. That was 662 days.

Alicia Glenn, the deputy mayor of De Blasio, who was in charge of housing and economic development at the time, arranged a workaround for NYCHA chairman Gregory Russ and NYCHA's personnel office to agree to Mustaciuolo's wishes.

NYCHA spokesperson Barbara Brancaccio confirmed this unusual arrangement and emphasized that the City Hall will reimburse the authority’s share of Mustaciuolo’s holiday expenses. She added that there will be no federal funding involved.

"NYCHA's chief operating officer, Vito Mustaciuolo, has served New York City for nearly 40 years," Brancaccio wrote in response to questions from New York City. "For forty years, he rarely asked for leave. When he was recruited to work at NYCHA, everyone agreed that he would be compensated this time."

In the 2021 fiscal year, which ends on June 30, Mustaciulo's salary is $258,000, and an additional $257,000 is spent on vacation time accumulated during his long career as an urban employee.

According to salary data compiled and released by the Empire Public Policy Center, a non-partisan government transparency organization, Lass ranked second on the list of city employees with the highest salaries in the 2021 fiscal year. His salary was $414,000.

"This kind of salary is too ridiculous. Between the chairman and the general manager/COO, it's nearly a million dollars," City Councilman Alicka Ampry-Samuel (D-Brooklyn) is a candidate for HUD's second district administrator. He told "City".

"Residents and advocates have long questioned the salary of NYCHA executives for good reason," added Ampry-Samuel, chairman of the committee's public housing committee. "For an organization that faces so many unresolved or resolved challenges, how does the city justify this level of overtime? When do we impose caps on certain spending levels? It's just not appropriate."

Peter Warren, research director of the Nonpartisan Empire Center, called the expenditure "very unusual."

"For people who don't leave, these large lump sum payments are very rare," he told the city.

Mustaciuolo and Russ are not the only NYCHA staff members listed as the highest paid earners in New York City. The data shows that several NYCHA plumbers and electricians also earned six-figure salaries through a lot of overtime work.

Excessive overtime is a long-term problem for NYCHA, and it seems to get worse during the pandemic.

NYCHA’s overtime costs rose from US$96 million in fiscal year 2019 (the last year before the virus outbreak) to US$138 million in fiscal year 2020 (end of June 2020), an increase of 45%.

According to the new salary data, in the year ending June 30, 2021, overtime pay once again climbed to 144 million U.S. dollars.

Overtime has made several senior NYCHA businessmen the highest-paid people in the city.

Take Robert Procida, a plumber in charge, for example, who has long been among the best on NYCHA's overtime scorecard.

Before the pandemic, Procida's OT revenue in fiscal year 2019 was US$181,000. In the second year, he took home $215,000 and then earned $248,000 in fiscal 2021.

This brings his total salary to $356,000-making him the ninth highest paid worker in the city.

Procida's income was close to the then school principal Richard Carranza's $360,000 that year, much higher than de Blasio's $253,000 and Andrew Cuomo's salary of $223,000 in fiscal year 2020, after which he resigned as governor due to shame.

All these high-octane payments took place as the authorities worked to provide safe and healthy conditions for 400,000 public housing residents.

According to a consent order on mold cleaning in apartments, the authorities are far behind in fulfilling their promised reforms, and the bill is pending in federal court. As early as 2018, NYCHA promised to resolve the root cause of mold, such as a broken pipe, within 15 days of receiving a repair request.

Records show that as of last month, managers only met the deadline 3.7% of the time.

After the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, NYCHA was forced to reduce maintenance for a period of time while trying to help stop the spread of the virus by significantly reducing the number of workers entering the apartment.

As a result, the number of unmet repair requests has steadily increased-from 461,000 in October 2020 to a record 583,000 last month.

Despite this, there are still a large number of New Yorkers looking for NYCHA apartments: the number of applicants on the waiting list reached 241,400 last month, an 18% increase from 204,100 in October 2020.

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