City Treasurer Brad Lander’s scathing review of the Adams administration’s contracts with DocGo reveals that the city should recoup more than $11 million of the nearly $14 million paid to the controversial migrant services provider last year. But why did Lander wait so long to break the news?
City Hall’s $432 million emergency DocGo contract, which was awarded without competitive bidding, resulted in millions being spent on “accommodations” and services that were not used and for which there were no permits.
Among the scandals is that the city was charged $569,500 to rent the Crowne Plaza JFK hotel in Queens for ten nights, even though not a single room was used during that period. In total, taxpayers paid $1.7 million for nearly 10,000 vacant room nights, giving DocGo $408,680 in commissions during that two-month period alone.
And about $800,000 in apparently unauthorized spending.
The Adams team points out that this was a response to the overwhelming and unprecedented influx of “asylum seekers” brought about by the Biden-Harris administration. The city was legally obligated to provide shelter no matter how many people showed up on its doorstep.
And the company says it changed its approach months ago when Lander’s team first flagged these problems.
However, the agency still has not explained why it is working with DocGo (formerly Rapid Reliable Testing NY LLC, as the agency began doing very different work during the COVID pandemic) on this issue in the first place, nor why it is handling the contracts through the Department of Housing Preservation and Development rather than through homeless service organizations with years of experience in these issues.
- Nearly $1.7 million for vacant hotel rooms, including $400,000 in commission.
- $2 million DocGo overpaid to security subcontractors
- Thousands to deliver 259,961 meals – 100,000 more meals than needed, given the number of migrants in the hotels.
- $21,974 in sales tax on food and other items – even though the state is exempt from paying sales tax.
However, Nicole Gelinas has been pointing out these problems in the post since last September.
So Lander should not be too complacent in addressing problems like “poor budget control” late: he has a whole squad of doomsayers who are legally empowered to look at the facts.
And yet he was only able to raise the alarm now, when (pure coincidence!) he was just launching his own candidacy for mayor?
(Note also that Lander is against Key actions taken by Adams to reduce these costs: He calls the mayor’s proposed 60-day limit on housing migrants “cruel.”)
The Audit Office has been a reliable auditor of the city’s government in the past, and its professional staff has undoubtedly done a good job here. It would be nice if their report could be viewed in a clear form and not through the prism of Lander’s ambitions.
Most importantly, New York should look beyond its political horizons and rethink the entire concept of migrant shelters: Not only has it burned billions, it has also created perverse incentives for even more people to cross the border illegally and come here.
This in itself is a much bigger scandal.