Asleep at the switch
Blas ‘mismanagement’ amid scandals: critics
As the de Blasio administration fends off numerous investigations of potential corruption, critics charge that it has repeatedly taken its eye off the ball when it comes to running the city.
Mayor de Blasio had committed this year to reducing the use of hotels to house the homeless, but instead their use has more than doubled to 6,000 people.
The overall homeless population has similarly climbed by 20 percent since he took office in January 2014 — to a record high of 60,059 last week.
And de Blasio promised last year that single-family home repairs for damage caused by Hurricane Sandy would be completed by the end of 2016, but he aban- doned that deadline last week as the completion rate stands at 44 percent.
“You get to a point where you start to say, ‘Look, New Yorkers, we have to pay attention to this because time and time again we are seeing mismanagement and no accountability — and we are fed up,’ ” said City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Queens).
She’s not the only official to question City Hall’s management.
Gov. Cuomo has repeatedly blamed the city’s “mismanagement” for the poor conditions of its homeless shelters and for the increasing homeless population.
When the administration was investigated for signing off on a real-estate deal that netted a developer $72 million in profit, and which lost a neighborhood its decades-old health care facility, Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office pointed to mismanagement as the root cause.
“The checks and balances in place to avoid this kind of outcome were mismanaged,” his office concluded in an Aug. 1 report.
Even the mayor admitted to a bureaucratic bungle this month after The Post reported that nearly 300 municipal workers were awarded raises as high as 40 percent over the summer, only to be told last month that the city goofed and would likely need to revoke the raises.
“This was a bureaucratic foul-up is the bottom line,” the mayor said on Oct. 13.
Among the probes of the administration, the mayor’s shuttered nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, is under investigation by the US Attorney’s Office and the Manhattan district attorney over potential pay-to-play deals involving firms with city business.
Hizzoner’s fund-raising on behalf of state Senate Democrats in 2014 is also being probed, as are a number of other deals, including the sale of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn in 2014.
To date, there have been no findings of wrongdoing on these issues, and the administration has repeatedly said it followed the guidance of lawyers at every step.