Council grills Adams admin over asylum seeker contracts
/
City Councilmember Julie Won led a hearing examining the city’s emergency procurement process related to the migrant crisis. Photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The Adams administration was grilled by the City Council over its contracting practices during the ongoing migrant crisis on Thursday, which comes as one of the companies contracted to provide city services to asylum seekers comes under major scrutiny.
City councilmembers asked a number of questions about the city’s process for contracting with that company – DocGo – and generally pushed top officials in the mayor’s administration for answers about how the city goes about ensuring the companies and nonprofits that receive no-bid contracts during emergencies are both above board and capable of providing the services their asked to provide.
“Rapidly arranged emergency contracting at the scale necessary to appropriately respond to the influx of people over this past year inevitably raises risks of waste, inefficiencies and even fraud, if not managed carefully,” Queens City Councilmember Julie Won, who chairs the council’s Committee on Contracts, said at the start of the hearing.
“Stories have emerged of unsafe and unsanitary conditions at several humanitarian relief facilities and the city comptroller's office found it necessary to audit emergency contracts relating to this crisis,” she added.
With over 116,000 asylum seekers having made their way to New York City dating back to last spring – and with around 60,000 currently in the city’s shelter system – the city has turned to a number of social services providers and for-profit businesses to provide an array of services to some of the city’s new arrivals.
Since last October – the month Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency related to the migrant crisis – the city has made over 200 contract actions, which range from creating a completely new contract with a business or organization to modifying an already-existing contract. In total, the city’s contracts with groups doing work related to the migrant crisis have an expected cost of around $2.05 billion, according to the administration.
The cost of the crisis has been so significant that Adams has ordered city agencies on several occasions to reduce their spending, including a recent order for agencies to reduce their spending by 5 percent.
But other city officials, including a number of members of the City Council, have pushed back against Adams’ cuts and his general assessment of the cost of the crisis.
On Thursday, Won and others said that they didn’t feel the administration was being transparent about how the city’s money was being spent in relation to the contracts.
“One of the problems is transparency is not extremely evident,” said City Councilmember Gale Brewer. “When you say it's conflated by the press and the City Council, it’s because it is really hard to get this information.”
According to Brewer and Won, the lawmakers invited several representatives from some of the groups that currently hold some of the largest contracts with the city related to the crisis to testify at Thursday’s hearing. Among them was the former CEO of DocGo, Anthony Capone, who resigned last week after it was revealed that he had fabricated his resume, which in itself had only come under scrutiny after a number of scandals arose surrounding DocGo’s contract with the city.
However, none of the representatives from the companies showed up to testify. According to the lawmakers, members of the Adams administration told them not to.
“We have invited seven executives of companies with key city contracts involving asylum seekers to testify today at the council hearing and not a single one of them has chosen to appear,” Won said. “In fact, we understand that the administration directed them to not appear and this is a violation of [the city’s charter].”
“These seven executives did not have the courage and respect to the city council as well as the people of New York City to testify before us,” she added.
Brewer said that by telling the executives not to testify, the administration was only making its contracting practices more opaque.
New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol testifies at a City Council hearing on Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. Photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit
“Just by not enabling the contractors to be here…we all need to be transparent,” Brewer said.
Adams administration officials defended the city’s contracting practices throughout the crisis. They also minimized the role of no-bid emergency contracts – like the one awarded to DocGo – in their response to the crisis.
“The vast majority of those contracts are not emergency contracts – I think we need to be clear about that,” said Zach Iscol, the commissioner of New York City Emergency Management. “I think it's also important to remember that just because it's an emergency procurement doesn't mean we are not following certain rules, procedures and regulations to make sure that we are sticking to the letter of the law and the charter, and that we're doing things right. It is just simply a faster process.”
Throughout the hearing on Thursday, councilmembers pressed the administration for answers about its $432 million contract with DocGo, which city officials defended.
Just this week, City Comptroller Brad Lander announced that his office had begun conducting a “real time audit” of the city’s contract with and oversight of DocGo. It’s the first time his office has ever conducted a real time audit, and it comes after he announced that his office declined to approve the company’s contract with the city – a move that was made moot by the mayor moving forward with the contract, an action he has the power to take.
State Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Kathy Hochul have both directed their offices to investigate DocGo after a number of migrants complained that they were being misled and mistreated by the company, which has moved a number of asylum seekers from New York City to upstate locales.
Lander, who testified at Thursday’s hearing, again scrutinized the city’s contract with DocGo, as well as the administration’s practices for procuring emergency contracts.
In July, Lander’s office issued a best practices memo to city agencies, which urged agencies to encourage competitiveness and oversight during the contracting process.
“Emergency contracting brings greater risk of waste and fraud, as agencies scramble to procure goods and services with less time and competition,” Lander said. “The evidence from emergency contracting for asylum seekers thus far reveals that there is still much work to be done by agencies to comply with those recommendations.”
