DeB’s Miami junket cost taxpayers $18K
Mayor de Blasio, First Lady Chirlane McCray and a dozen underlings spent more than $18,000 on a taxpayer-funded junket to Miami Beach earlier this year, according to records released Wednesday.
Hizzoner brought a record-sized retinue to the 85th annual meeting of the US Conference of Mayors at the five-star Fontainebleau hotel, where most of the contingent stayed in $343-a-night rooms.
The Post first reported on de Blasio’s Sunshine State getaway in June, when he jetted off to push his progressive agenda amid a last-minute crisis over continued mayoral control of the schools.
At the time, City Hall refused to provide the cost, suggesting that The Post file a Freedom of Information Law request.
The 97 pages of records released Wednesday detail $18,711 in spending on airfare, lodging, meals and other expenses racked up by 13 of the 14 city officials who traveled to the sun-soaked event.
Bills submitted by Environmental Protection Commissioner Vincent Sapienza weren’t included, and it was unclear how high they would push the total.
Buried in the records were invoices revealing that de Blasio’s crew included Stephanie Yazgi, the live-in girlfriend of top mayoral adviser Emma Wolfe.
In 2015, The Post revealed that de Blasio appointed Yazgi to a newly created, unadvertised job as the $150,000-a-year “national campaign director” in the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
The city Conflicts of Interest Board approved her hiring despite her “periodic working relationship” with Wolfe. Yazgi was later pro- moted to a senior mayoral adviser.
The bills included a pair of $800 admission tickets bought by federal-government liaison Matthew McNally and Alana Leviton, McCray’s chief of staff. City Hall said everyone else got in as their guests.
There was also a daily $64 food allowance per person. Daniel Zarrilli, the mayor’s senior director of climate policy, took nine Uber rides costing $195.
De Blasio has attended every meeting of the mayors group since taking office in 2014. Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg attended only occasionally, with three or four staffers, a source said.
De Blasio spokesman Austin Finan defended the record number of city attendees by calling 2017 “a different year than any previous.”
“We have significant threats out of Washington . . . and these meetings are important tools in creating coalitions with allies across the country who can be influential in pushing back,” Finan said.