[NYPOST] Mayor Bill de Blasio’s $400,000-a-year pick to run the city’s beleaguered public housing agency admitted to The Post on Thursday that he’s not worried about failing ‐ because he’s near the end of his career and won’t need another job."In the Warren Wilhelm...errr....DeBlas administration, it's kinda expected"
Greg Russ, 69, said he has "a much different mindset than when I was coming up" and "it feels like this is a good time to try something like this."
"The risk of any new adventure ‐ I can take that without necessarily worrying about what I do next because what I do next is a function of where I am in my life now," he said.
Russ also warned long-suffering New York City Housing Authority tenants who went without heat last winter that they may face the same struggles again.
"I think this winter is going to be tough because I’m getting there late in the season, but we’ll figure that out," he said by phone from Minneapolis, where he runs that city’s Public Housing Authority.
"But we'll defrost you in Spring 2020, youbetcha"
"So, the job is to do the work to make sure the boilers function. And, I’ve used all kinds of backup mechanisms when we knew we had shaky boilers in housing authorities I’ve worked at. Our job is to make sure the heat stays on and if it goes out, it gets back on fast."
Russ wouldn’t say how he negotiated his lucrative salary, which is nearly twice the $231,000 earned by his predecessor, Shola Olatoye, who resigned in disgrace amid a scandal over falsified lead-paint inspection reports.