New NYC Council and its speaker flip the script — – Latest News
Here’s a shocker: The City Council is definitely seeking to save money.
That’s proper: Under its new speaker, Julie Menin, it’s planning laws to curb the metropolis’s often-abused emergency-contract system.
Kudos to her for shifting this alongside.
The system, which lets mayors rent companies with out aggressive bidding and the standard scrutiny during occasions of disaster, grew to become subject to critical abuse underneath Mayors Bill de Blasio during COVID and Eric Adams during the migrant disaster, at the price of thousands and thousands.
But now the council — notorious for its reckless requires more spending — is seeking to rein in City Hall.
As Menin famous in The Post, each mayors “kept on ‘crisis buying’ for more than a year, without ever comparing prices or rooting out contractor abuse, fraud and waste.”
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De Blasio prolonged his pandemic-era government order permitting the metropolis to bypass aggressive bidding more than 100 occasions — getting into into virtually 1,400 contracts value almost $7 billion with out the standard scrutiny.
Ex-Comptroller Scott Stringer discovered the metropolis misplaced $1.9 million in a failed effort to buy ventilators from Global Medical Supply Group LLC.
During the migrant disaster, the Adams administration awarded a $432 million no-bid contract to DocGo to handle the metropolis’s migrant disaster.
The company then billed the metropolis for unused resort rooms and uneaten migrant meals and used unlicensed security guards, authorities charged.
Adams additionally awarded a sketchy $54 million no-bid contract to a NJ-based start-up to provide migrants pay as you go debit playing cards.
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Such contracts are Exhibit A in the case for guardrails on City Hall’s use of its emergency powers.
Even the place there’s no fraud, a aggressive bidding course of may flip up higher, or cheaper, distributors.
Recall how Gov. Kathy Hochul’s people awarded a whopping $637 million no-bid contract to a high political donor for COVID check children, reportedly paying twice as a lot as what different distributors charged.
Council laws would restrict emergency contracts to 30-days, power subcontractors to offer detailed info and create a public database of metropolis procurements.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s workplace opposed the measures claiming they’d impede emergency Department of Buildings contracts.
Wrong, they’d simply subject them to a small bit of accountability.
Now if solely somebody may push by related laws to curb abuses by governors . . .
