EXCLUSIVE
It’s a $7 million waste of space — and taxpayers are picking up the tab.
The city’s largest pension system has blown $2.5 million on rent for an emergency backup office that has sat empty and unusable for six years.
And it’s sinking another $4.7 million into renovating the 27,000-square-foot “disaster recovery site” in Long Island City, Queens, though the space can accommodate only one-third of its workers and is closer to Midtown Manhattan’s terror targets than its current location in downtown Brooklyn.
The $113 billion New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS) signed a lease in 2006 for the top floor of a former Macy’s warehouse to serve in case of a terror attack or other calamity at its headquarters at 355 Adams St., near MetroTech.
But the dust-gathering space is still not ready.
Renovation appears to be a long way from being completed. A Post reporter visited the 10th-floor loft Friday and found unfinished walls and floors.
NYCERS signed a 10-year lease, with rent that started at $365,000 per year and climbed to $500,000 this year. The office is to hold about 150 of the fund’s 400 workers.
The fund’s finance team glossed over the problems in its 2011 annual report, failing to mention that it has been paying rent since 2006 and that the site has never been used. Nor did it reveal that $5 million in renovations were needed.
Though administrative expenses come out of pension coffers, taxpayers indirectly cover overhead because the city must bail out city pension funds when their investments don’t increase by 8 percent each year. That was the case in at least two years of the office’s lease, 2008 and 2009.
Former NYCERS Executive Director John Murphy on his blog blasts the project as a boondoggle.
“My professional opinion is this site is seriously flawed and will never be able to function at any acceptable level as a business disaster recovery site for NYCERS,” Murphy wrote.
But NYCERS lawyer Karen Mazza defends the project, saying the new space is needed because of two fires and two floods at its headquarters since 2007.
A 2009 fire delayed the new location, she said, adding, “It was our decision to redesign the space after the fire.”
She said the new office would be ready to open by April 1 and “has been both cost and quality effective.”
