#Free meals meant for needy left at wrong address — since May

Emergency meals that were mistakingly sent to Elena Tavarez.
Elena Tavarez

Emergency city coronavirus meals meant for the needy have since May been showing up outside the home of a Brooklyn woman who never requested the free food — despite her weekly calls to 311 about the mixup.

“It’s just crazy to me that there’s no way to actually get in contact with them to make a correction,” Windsor Terrace resident Elena Tavarez told The Post.

The city’s GetFoodNYC delivers meals to New Yorkers struggling from the COVID-19 pandemic as Mayor Bill de Blasio has said 2 million people don’t have enough to eat this summer.

“It’s horrible and we feel terrible because it keeps getting left outside and we’re not aware of it so I can’t even donate it because the food is rotten half the time,” she said. A couple times she has managed to rescue the misdirected deliveries and post the free food on a local Facebook page for redistribution.

Tavarez says the deliveries — made by out-of-work taxi drivers — are totally random though she said three to four boxes a week typically get dumped in different places around the outside of their private home.

“Today there were about six meals left that were supposed to be frozen. The other day we got three boxes and each box had about nine meals in it so about 18 meals.

“Some are fresh fruit; the ones today were like a chicken parmesan and pasta bolognese and a salmon,” she recounted.

Tavarez said 311 dispatchers take her complaint but claim there’s no way for her to contact the food program directly — and the messages don’t appear to be getting through.

“I have called a minimum at least once a week if not more than that,” Tavarez said.

She’s also left messages for the delivery people on her front door alerting them to the problem, but it continues.

A spokesman for the GetFoodNYC said the mixup occurred after a program client listed an incorrect address for deliveries on two occasions. GetFoodNYC learned of the problem via Tavarez’s 311 calls, but only one of the entires was corrected.

“This was a unique case, the result of a technical error where an individual was in the system twice. We appreciate it being brought to our attention and have stopped deliveries to this address,” the spokesman said.

But earlier this week The Post exclusively reported that someone ditched 34 boxes of GetFoodNYC meals near a Queens highway overpass. A city Department of Sanitation worker eventually came to toss the spoiled food into his garbage truck– eight hours after a concerned passerby called 311 about the issue.

In April another Post investigation revealed that seniors, including a Holocaust survivor keeping Kosher, were going hungry because of the programs many missteps.