NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Trump’s Civil Fraud Penalty Gets Tossed, NJ Shuts Enrollment for Childcare Vouchers, and Staff Shortages Affect Cooling Towers Inspections

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

A New York appeals court has thrown out President Trump’s massive civil fraud penalty. Plus, New Jersey has stopped enrolling new families seeking child care vouchers. And finally, health department officials lost more than a third of their cooling tower inspectors in the three years leading up to the outbreak despite a significant boost in funding.

President Trump's civil fraud penalty gets tossed out. New Jersey shuts down enrollment for child care vouchers. And staff shortages affect cooling tower inspections. Did that lead to Harlem's Legionaire's outbreak? From WMYC, this is NYC now. I'm Jene Pierre. A New York appeals court has thrown out President Trump's massive civil fraud penalty. The president and others in the Trump organization had been on the hook for

more than $500 million after a judge found them liable for inflating the value of their assets. New York Attorney General Letitia James' office brought the case. She did not immediately comment on the move, which comes amid a legal back and forth between the president, the Department of Justice, and the AG. The judges in the ruling called the previous verdict, quote, excessive. President Trump and his co-defendants have denied any wrongdoing. New Jersey has stopped enrolling new family. seeking child care vouchers. WMYC's Karen Yee reports, the program doesn't have enough money to help

everyone who needs it. With enrollment for new families frozen, that means low-income New Jersey parents who just had a baby and can't afford child care won't be able to apply, even if they have an older child already on a voucher. State vouchers help families afford child care or after school by subsidizing the cost, with families paying 2 to 5 percent of their income as a co-pay. But with increasing enrollment and higher reimbursement rates for providers, the program has run out of money to help new families. Co-pays are also increasing for the 70,000 families currently receiving a voucher. While lawmakers agreed to boost funding for the program, it's still about $70 million short. Harlem's Legionaire's disease outbreak has killed five people and left dozens sick.

After the break, we learn about the city's role in inspecting cooling towers where the bacteria can grow. Stick around. As Harlem residents contend with an ongoing outbreak of Legionnaire's disease that's killed five people and sickened more than a hundred, we're learning more about the city's role in inspecting cooling towers where the bacteria that causes the disease can grow if unchecked. Health Department officials say they lost more than a third of their cooling tower inspectors in the three years leading up to the outbreak, despite a significant boost in funding for the unit that oversees the inspections. Joining me to talk about this more is WMYC's data reporter Joe Hung. Really quickly, what are cooling towers and why do they need to be inspected?

Yeah, so cooling towers, they typically sit on top of buildings. They are part of the building's heating and air conditioning system, and they help circulate water throughout the building. And the water sort of absorbs heat and cools the building. And once the water comes back to the tower, the water that's been warmed up sort of evaporates and ejects the heat through water vapor. Now, the warm water can breed deadly bacteria like the Legionella bacteria. If it sort of sits in that warm tank for too long without being inspected and cleaned, there was a really bad outbreak in 2015 where, 138 people got sick and 16 people died. But that outbreak, it led to some new regulations around

cooling towers. They're now required to be registered with the city and building owners are required to test them weekly for all bacterial growth and every 90 days they're required to test them for the Legionella bacteria. The new regulations also authorize the city to inspect these towers and the city health department aims to inspect each and every one every year. A few weeks ago, you found that the city was on pace this year to inspect about half the number of towers as compared to 2022. Why is there such a steep decline there? Yeah, so a spokesperson for the health department told me that the drop in inspections was due to a staff shortage. I'm going to throw a few numbers at you first, and then I'll give you sort of the big takeaway. So back in,

2022, when Adams first entered office as mayor, that year the health department had 33 inspectors and four trainees. So that's 37 staff who are inspecting these cooling towers. That year, the city conducted about 4,400 inspections. Now, fast forward to this year, the city has 24 inspectors, and as of June is expected to inspect about 1,100 towers. So that was a lot of numbers. The takeaway here is that we now have two-thirds the number of inspectors compared to 2022, but they've conducted about half the number of inspections. The health department has sort of in adamant that the staff shortage did not cause the current outbreak.

They said, you know, more inspections would not have necessarily prevented it. And they've also emphasized that they've had enough staff to sort of mitigate the spring. of the current outbreak. Talk a bit more about why these city inspections are so important. We know that there's a staff shortage, but, you know, it has to happen. And it's just not. Right. So I mentioned the regulations that came into effect after that really bad outbreak in 2015,

they sort of insult two layers of prevention, right? So on one hand, you have testing by building owners and the city inspections. Without the city inspections, building owners can sort of just fly under the radar and cut corners. And this is a big concern among the experts and sort of the water testing professionals that work in this field. The inspectors from the city sort of come in and make sure that the building owners have been doing their job and doing regular tests and more importantly, like keeping records of the regular testing that they're doing. Now, it's unreasonable to expect the city inspectors to do this kind of regular testing because it needs to be done once week, at least. And the Legionella bacteria that causes Legionnaire's disease can grow to dangerous levels within two weeks. Why are inspectors so hard to recruit?

According to the job postings and according to the Health Department spokesperson that I've been speaking with, these inspectors ideally would have like a master's degree or equivalent work experience in engineering or science. And it's also just a pretty physical job. They regularly need to sort of like use a ladder, climb to high altitudes on top of these buildings to inspect these towers. So it's a pretty unique combination of, you know, physicality, but also like academic sort of, training that's required for these positions. The city released the addresses of the buildings in Harlem that tested positive for Legionella in the outbreak. What do we know about these buildings and their cooling towers?

Right. The city released 10 addresses, and according to public data, these 10 addresses have 21 cooling towers total. Some of these buildings only have one, others have multiple. The public data that I've been looking at for these past couple weeks, it tells us two things. So it tells us, one, how recently building owners test for Legionella, and two, the last time that the city inspected these cooling towers. And among the 10 addresses, nine of them have cooling towers that are either behind on testing by building owners or have not been inspected by the city in the past year. That's WMYC's Joe Hong. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC.

I'm Jenae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.