A $15 million trust fund set up to help New York City homeowners bilked by home improvement contractors has gone mostly unused for years — even as consumers beg the city for help.
The Home Improvement Contractor Trust Fund dates back to 1997, and was making a steady stream of payments to consumers wronged by licensed contractors. But, payouts dwindled after the city’s consumer affairs department stopped hearing cases in 2017. Since then, the trust fund has accumulated revenue through contractor license fees, but only paid out a fraction of that revenue to help consumers.
All the while, consumers say they are still being cheated.
“The money is just sitting there and they’re creating all these unnecessary roadblocks to get to the money,” Lori Ciraolo, a Brooklyn homeowner, said in an interview.
In 2022, Ciraolo hired a contractor licensed by the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The contractor’s work ended up being shoddy and cost Ciraolo upwards of $50,000. She made a complaint to the consumer affairs department in hopes of accessing the trust fund.
“I was absolutely hopeful because I realized that there is no way this guy was going to pay me,” Ciraolo said. “And if he didn’t pay, I’d at least have access to the trust fund.”
But accessing the fund has become exceedingly rare.
According to data provided by the city’s Independent Budget Office, between 2010 and 2017 the fund averaged $876,000 a year in payments to cheated consumers. Since 2018, the average dropped to less than a fifth of that, averaging just $153,000 to consumers. Meanwhile, the trust fund grew an average of $1.8 million per year.
Payments to wronged consumers began drying up after a bureaucratic change under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017 that consolidated consumer affairs tribunals in another department. Consumer affairs officials under Mayor Eric Adams say they hope further bureaucratic changes will remedy this and release more of the…
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