No-bid? No-go!
A trio of bills to reform New York City government’s abuse-ridden system for awarding contracts gained traction Tuesday, despite testy opposition from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s fledgling administration in its first hearing before the City Council.
The proposed reforms come after years of simmering frustration over the nearly $13 billion in emergency city contracts shelled out under former mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams during the COVID-19 pandemic and the migrant crisis.
Council Speaker Julie Menin sponsored the marquee bill that would put a 30-day limit on those emergency agreements and add steps for their renewal.
She argued Adams’ $432 million no-bid misadventure with DocGo — which billed the city for unused hotel rooms and uneaten meals for migrants — was a symbol of everything wrong with the current contract system.
“This all could have been avoided with a proper system of checks and balances and proper bidding,” Menin urged.
“These numbers represent a system that has abandoned basic principles of fiscal responsibility. These two crises — the COVID crisis and asylum seeker crisis — laid bare how emergencies are often used, quite frankly, as an excuse to avoid the competitive bidding rules that ensure taxpayers get a fair deal.”
The other bills would force subcontractors to provide detailed information, with fines as much as $100,000 for noncompliance, and build a public database of city procurements.
While Menin and council members openly were eager to see Mamdani’s fresh-faced administration turn a new leaf on no-bid emergency contracts, those hopes were seemingly dashed when the new mayor’s chief procurement officer Kim Yu used the hearing to rail against the three bills aiming to add oversight.
She argued emergency contracts are primarily used for destabilized buildings and adding more approvals would be cumbersome for contractors.
“They’ve withstood the test of time, and they’re battle-tested, and there’s a certain amount of rigor that is applied when emergency contracts go through the process that’s outlined in the law,” she said.
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Eventually, Yu’s stream of bureaucratic claptrap and repeated insistence to hash the matter out “offline” behind closed doors — and out of the public’s eye — led to a spicy exchange with a frustrated Councilman Jim Gennaro (D-Queens).
“I know this was put together in a short time, and I get all that. But to me, it’s unseemly and non-cooperative,” Gennaro railed.
“There’s someone whose reply is, ‘I don’t really want to talk about it here in front of a bunch of people. We should get together and caucus behind closed doors and figure something out.’ That doesn’t work for me, and I don’t think that should be the paradigm for you or any witness that comes for this committee.”
Yu snapped back with a sarcastic, “Thank you for your thoughts on the appropriate behavior and decorum for this.”
“I’ll say that I have appeared, I have prepared, I have testified, I have answered questions, and it is my intent to have a professional cordial collegial relationship with this Council, and it is in all of our interests in the city of New York to do our best. And so, thank you for that,” she said.
The drama likely won’t stop the bills’ march.
The council is scheduled to vote on the bills Thursday.
