Council Grills Mamdani Health Team Over Deadly UES Legionnaires’ Outbreak

City Council members grilled city health officials over the Mamdani administration’s response to a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak on Manhattan’s Upper East Side this summer that killed 11 people and ranked among the largest in the city’s history.

Lawmakers on the Council health committee zeroed in on the Health Department’s struggle to speedily hire and train scientists, known as water ecologists, who respond to positive tests for harmful bacteria including Legionella, which causes Legionnaire’s disease. More than a third of positions in that unit were still unfilled after the outbreak began despite a funding boost approved last year, The City Reporter uncovered in July.

The city hired eight more water ecologists this summer, bringing the total number of staff to 43 out of an approved headcount of 56, officials have said. Dr. Alister Martin, the health commissioner, told lawmakers on Wednesday that the agency is working to fill six more open positions, noting that the ecologists are “highly specialized.”

“That’s very good, but our point is that had the department filled these vacant positions, we would probably not be in this situation that we’re in right now,” Council Speaker Julie Menin responded.

The hearing comes after  Dr. Martin announced Friday two additional deaths linked to the waterborne Legionella bacteria; he also said there are no longer any patients hospitalized for the pneumonia-like illness anywhere in the city.

Menin and the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani have presented dueling strategies for how to deal with and prevent future outbreaks.

The Mamdani administration unveiled a set of proposals ahead of Wednesday’s hearing focused on finding unregistered cooling towers, “accelerating” enforcement of violations, and convening a scientific panel that studies “emerging cooling tower technology and alternative cooling systems.” Those efforts overlap with a slate of bills introduced by City Council members. 

‘We Cannot Scrimp’

Approximately 50 people signed up to testify at Wednesday’s hearing, including the grieving loved ones of several victims.

Ida Goldstein, the widow of Legionnaires’ victim Robert Goldstein, said the bacteria had infected him with “no warning, took his life away and destroyed me.” The retired businessman and Air Force veteran was among the first fatal victims of this year’s outbreak.

“We were married 50 years and my loss of him is tremendous. He really fought for his life in every possible way,” Goldstein said. “He was my everything, my soulmate, the love of my life.”

Daniel Thomas, whose father Charles, a former New York state judge, also died this summer, urged officials to act. “The 2025 outbreak in Harlem should have been a wake-up call to the entire city and every building owner, everyone who was doing enforcement,” he said, referring to a Legionella cluster that killed seven people last year. “We cannot scrimp, we cannot cut corners on something that is completely preventable.” 

MORE: Survivors and Families Sue NYC Over Deadly Legionnaires’ Outbreak in Harlem Last Year

After the Harlem outbreak, the city required building owners to test their cooling towers monthly, instead of quarterly. Those rules went into effect in May, before the July wave of Legionnaires’ cases on the Upper East Side. The health department inspects when building owners report critical levels of Legionella bacteria in their cooling towers.

Dr. Martin told lawmakers on Wednesday that “the ink was barely dry” on those requirements when the cluster began in July and said the current compliance rate is 77%. 

In July, the City Reporter revealed that hundreds of landlords and building managers had failed to submit required Legionella tests of their air conditioning cooling towers to the Department of Health since at least last year, and that 388 showed no record of submitting any test results at all.

Public health experts have condemned efforts to “politicize” the crisis. In an opinion piece published in City & State, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and city Health Department official, appeared to reference a controversial July 21 article in the New York Post that Speaker Menin penned. The piece’s original headline blamed “Mamdani’s minions” in the health department for the crisis; that headline was later changed. 

“Dehumanizing public health workers as ‘minions,’ claiming they ‘failed’ New Yorkers before the outbreak is over…distracts from the message that mattered most: to seek care if you feel sick,” Daskalakis wrote, without mentioning the speaker. “It weakens trust in that message when following it can be the difference in life or death.”

Menin ordered the oversight hearing after reports in The City Reporter about the critical water ecologist vacancies and calls from the union representing the city’s public health workers to address those and other staffing issues across the agency.

Meghan Peterson, the president of Local 3005 of District Council 37, submitted testimony for Wednesday’s hearing claiming, in part, that “even with the additional funding, the city could not recruit a full headcount of water ecologists because the salaries are too low to live on in New York City.” Salaries for the specialists start at $52,000 a year.

Water ecologists are tasked with ensuring that building owners are complying with city law that requires them to submit monthly tests showing their water and cooling systems are free of the Legionella bacteria. The specialists also inspect cooling towers that have been reported to have harmful levels of the bacteria.

Peterson urged lawmakers to take a “holistic approach” to address longstanding hiring and onboarding delays at the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget impacting the health department and other agencies across the city.

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