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City Council Speaker Julie Menin unveiled a bill Tuesday to curb the deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak on the Upper East Side — slamming Mayor Zohran Mamdani for dropping the ball.
The new measure calls for a COVD-like public education campaign, stepped up inspections of buildings that have not conducted cooling tower inspections, and a Legionnaires’ hotline to keep New Yorkers informed of the latest news and concerns.
Four people have died since the outbreak was first reported July 2, with dozens more confirmed to be infected.
“We have so many questions that still remain unanswered,” Menin said. “The past few weeks have been a very tense and difficult time for the East Side of Manhattan. We know that at least 76 people have been infected in the latest outbreak of Legionnaires’, and that seven of our neighbors remain hospitalized.
“The concern is that the health department opted not to proactively disinfect, to wait for test results to come back, particularly around the epicenter, where there were a lot of positive cases.”
The Post first reported on the proposal on Monday.
Menin said an understaffed health department has fallen behind on testing Big Apple cooling towers used for air conditioning systems in large scale buildings — where outbreaks of the Legionella bacteria, which thrives in warm water, typically occur in the summer months.
More than 25% of buildings are not in compliance, Menin said.
“As the number of cases have increased, so have the number of concerns,” she said. “I’ve heard from so many constituents who lacked essential information on disease risk, on exposure, on prevention.”
The outbreak came after more than 250 cooling towers around the Big Apple were cited for issues relating to Legionella testing since last year, with more than half in Manhattan.
Rounds of tests on the Upper East Side after the outbreak showed 76 buildings – including the Guggenheim – harbored the bacteria.
All those buildings cleaned and disinfected their cooling towers, health officials said.
The council has scheduled an oversight hearing in September to review the Mamdani administration’s preparation and response to the outbreak and determine why the public was kept in the dark.
The council’s position is that City Hall should have been more prepared after a Legionnaires’ outbreak in Harlem last year killed five people and infected more than 100 during the warm months.
In the aftermath, the council passed a law requiring building owners to test for the bacteria every 30 days during the hot season — but the city has fallen short.
“In the budget, the Department of Health is supposed to have twice the number of inspectors they had last year,” Lynn Schuman, who chairs the council’s Committee on Health, said Tuesday. “But they haven’t hired a lot of them. We don’t know if that’s the administration. We don’t know what’s happening.”
Schulman said the fear is the number of cases will only increase.
“I think those numbers are gonna creep up,” she said. “Not a lot, but they will creep up.”
The bill is expected to be officially introduced in the coming weeks.
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