The following article appeared in todays NY Daily News: Stung by a series of gruesome deaths blamed on faulty elevators, the city Housing Authority plans to spend millions to fix the lifts that often infuriate and injure its 406,000 residents.

NYCHA will spend $5 million to hire new elevator inspectors and maintenance teams. An additional $107 million will go to replace 630 of its 3,335 elevators over five years.

NYCHA is installing computerized tracking so managers can “see” elevators from remote locations to determine where they are and if they’re working properly.

The system, in place in some developments, sends a stream of data to a central computer to help flag problems before an elevator goes out of service.

An important new program will install new cameras and encourage residents to report vandalism, a leading cause of elevator failure. The moves are long overdue, and driven by public and political pressure.

Tomorrow, when NYCHA Chairman Tino Hernandez testifies before the City Council, he will surely be grilled about the tragic death of Jacob Neuman, a 5-year-old boy who recently fell to his death while trying to escape a stalled elevator in Brooklyn’s Taylor Wythe Houses.

He’ll probably also be asked about the death of Lillian Milan, an asthma sufferer who died trying to walk up 10 flights in the Bushwick Houses in September 2007.

On any given day, nearly 200 NYCHA elevators are out of service. A recent report by the Daily News I-Team showed repairs can often take weeks or months.

To his credit, Hernandez not only didn’t duck my questions – he invited me to spend part of yesterday poking around NYCHA’s “elevator university.”

It’s a sprawling setup in a converted Long Island City warehouse with a staggering number of training stations, complete with motors, pulleys, cables and several generations of elevators converted into simulators.

Under the direction of John Ashton, an elevator guru with nearly 30 years at NYCHA, an army of 400 mechanics, inspectors and assistants who service NYCHA elevators train on the equipment and get dispatched to handle the hundreds of elevator failures that happen each day.

All of that is a great start, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of NYCHA’s perennial budget deficits, estimated at around $200 million a year.

The bad news is that half the money for elevator repairs will come from other programs. That means more leaky roofs, broken pipes and furnaces that fail in winter.

Hernandez and his team are trying hard with not enough money, manpower or help from state and federal agencies.

The sad truth is that we won’t fix what ails NYCHA unless we give it the money it needs to do the job.

(LINK to NY Daily News)