Deadbeat de Blasio

It turns out Team de Blasio is so incompetent, it can’t pay bills on time — or even bother to try. The Post’s Nolan Hicks reported Tuesday that his examination of more than 59,000 city contracts since de Blasio took office shows the city is routinely late on paying its providers.

Citywide, Hicks found the average latepayment rate is 59 percent. But at the Department of Homeless Services, it’s a staggering 80 percent — to the point where outside providers, many of them cashstrapped nonprofits, have had to borrow money to keep afloat while Team de Blasio dawdles on its paperwork.

One agency actually had to get an emergency loan from City Hall after its workers lost their health insurance because of a cash crunch caused by the administration’s constant late payments.

Naturally, this all has an impact on the very people de Blasio claims to be trying to help, having ramped up spending on the homeless to more than $2 billion a year.

Pay people late, even if you have a monopoly, and you get trouble: Competent, honest people find something else to do — and more and more of your vendors wind up being incompetent and/or dishonest.

City Council Contracting Committee Chairman Justin Brannan (D-B’klyn) is promising an investigation. But the mayor’s people claim to know precisely who’s at fault — and, naturally, it’s not them: They blame “inherited contracting backlogs” and the need to “reform outdated rates.”

Then why does the problem seem to be getting worse? Because city Comptroller Scott Stringer followed up with a report focusing only on human-services contracts in Fiscal Year 2017, Mayor de Blasio’s fourth year in office — reporting that agencies submitted 90.8 percent of contracts late, half of them by six months or more.

Homeless Services submitted all contracts late — and 18 percent were more than a year late. The Department of Education wasn’t much better: It sent only one of 406 program contracts in before the vendor had started work.

Add yet another one to de Blasio’s long list of broken promises: “The check’s in the mail.”