The Great Bus Co. Giveaway
Kudos to City Councilman Paul Vallone for refusing to let Mayor de Blasio get away with his unprecedented gift of taxpayer dollars to reward a single school-bus company — a firm run by a big donor and repped by Democratic fixer Harold Ickes.
Vallone (D-Queens) is following up on now exCouncilman Dan Garodnick’s efforts to stop the giveaway. As Garodnick said, it flies “in the face of procurement rules, the City Council’s authority and the NYS constitutional ban on giving away taxpayer dollars as a gift.”
Originally presented as lasting just one year, the subsidy is now in its fourth. And there’s no telling how long the mayor will have his Department of Small Business Services keep renewing it.
The claim is that the cash is to benefit bus drivers who were harmed when Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended a bizarre system whereby the city covered the added costs of private firms’ extra pay for senior employees.
By putting bus routes up for bid, the Bloomberg team expected to save $400 million over five years. But de Blasio’s giveaways have now sucked up more than a quarter of that —$136 million — with no end in sight.
And all to boost a single company that bid low to win its contracts and then asked the city to simply give it more cash anyway.
Why does the mayor keep doing that? Well, the Texas-based company belongs to Alexis Lodde, who agreed to give $100,000 to state Senate Democratic candidates in 2014 — when de Blasio was orchestrating donations to that cause in the pay-toplay scheme for which he later barely escaped indictment.
Plus, of course, the drivers union hired Ickes, a de Blasio ally, to lobby for the initial giveaway in the form of a City Council bill that led to the first $42 million of the subsidy.
But the council didn’t know the payouts would go to just one firm. That explains why the mayor never again asked lawmakers to OK the specific payout, instead burying it in his overall budget.
As the Citizens Budget Commission notes, it’s a terrible precedent — eroding the Bloomberg savings and undermining the integrity of the city’s procurement process by letting one firm win extra cash after bidding to provide a service for less.
The city Department of Investigation is still looking into how badly the grants violate city rules. But Vallone is entirely correct to say in the absence of a DOI report the council’s Small Business Committee needs to do its own hearing.