NYCHA bribe bust fallout
Bx. pol pushes tighter oversight of all contracts
The New York City Housing Authority would have to publicly disclose information about all contracts it enters into with private actors — regardless of dollar amounts — under a bill introduced in Congress on Wednesday, the Daily News has learned.
The bill, authored by Bronx Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, is a direct response to the NYCHA bribery scandal that came to light Tuesday as federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted 70 current and former Housing Authority superintendents on charges that they solicited $2 million in bribes from private contractors. In exchange for the bribes, the supers are accused of giving the private operators no-bid “micro-purchase” contracts for NYCHA complex construction jobs that didn’t exceed $10,000 in value.
Under current law, NYCHA doesn’t need to publicly report information about procurements in that small-dollar price category — and Torres argued it’s that gap in transparency that has allowed corruption to fester at the public housing agency.
‘“For five years, I have been sounding the alarm about NYCHA’s chronic lack of oversight over no-bid contracting, which can easily become a breeding ground for fraud, corruption and abuse,” said Torres, who as a member of the City Council called in 2019 for stricter transparency requirements around NYCHA micro-purchase contracts. Torres also grew up in public housing.
“One case of bribery or a few cases of bribery can be explained away as outliers,” he continued. “But 70 cases of bribery, affecting one-third of NYCHA properties, points to a systemic failure of management and oversight. It points to a culture of corruption.”
Asked for a response to Torres’ comments, NYCHA spokeswoman Barbara Brancaccio said the authority has “already made substantial reforms to its procurement processes,” citing a “nearly 50% reduction in micro-purchase spend on services” since 2021.
“While micro-purchases allow for staff to quickly and flexibly respond to emergencies at the development level, these recent and unfortunate events demonstrate that additional oversight is needed,” Brancaccio said.
Torres’ legislation, a copy of which was obtained by The News ahead of its introduction in the House of Representatives, would specifically order the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to require every public housing agency in the country to disclose information about all private outsourcing contracts they award.
Such disclosures would divulge the date of the contract, information about the goods and services provided as part of it as well as the identities of the agency official who solicited the contract and the vendor executing it, according to the bill text.
It was not immediately clear how the bill will fare in the House, which is controlled by Republicans.
None of the contractors who paid out bribes to NYCHA supers were charged as part of Tuesday’s massive bust.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a press conference that the indicted supers created an environment in which micro-purchase bidders knew they couldn’t get the contracts unless they paid kickbacks first.
In one especially egregious case, Juan Mercado, a super at the Hammel Houses and Carleton Manor, two jointly managed NYCHA properties in Queens, solicited and accepted at least $314,300 in bribes between April 2014 and this past July, making him the top offender in the scandal, according to prosecutors.
In a letter to NYCHA CEO Lisa Bova-Hiatt on Wednesday, Torres lamented that the agency never tightened rules around micro-purchase procurement after his 2019 lament. He asked her to provide him with information about all steps the agency has taken since then to improve oversight in the contracting gray area.
“NYCHA owes the people of New York transparency about the progress it has made toward procurement reform in public housing,” he wrote to Bova-Hiatt.