An Insane Schoolbus Deal

For all their claims to be desperate for cash, City Hall and the Department of Education are still looking to buy a yellow bus company. It’s nuts — and squalid.

Yes, squalid: Post reporting IDs the company as Reliant Transportation, whose owner is one of Mayor de Blasio’s donors and which has long gotten favorable treatment.

The mayor not only has a hiring freeze on, he’s on the verge of laying off 22,000 city workers — yet he’s looking to add 1,800 new employees, plus an estimated $150 million pension liability.

Meanwhile, the DOE still hasn’t finalized the contracts to transport vulnerable special-needs kids — barely a week before school was to start. (Was the realization that the DOE needed to settle a whole host of bus issues a secret reason the mayor agreed to delay reopening?)

Chancellor Richard Carranza, with typical incompetence, has gone through three heads of the Office of Pupil Transportation.

Last year, he canned Alexandra Robinson for mismanaging a $9 million project to outfit 6,000 buses with GPS-trackers. It took a scoop by The Post’s Susan Edelman to get the DOE to cancel bus contracts, weeks after the pandemic closed all schools.

And now the city’s still chasing the Reliant deal, which apparently aims to give the DOE its own bus fleet to transport special-needs students. To escape scrutiny by the City Council and comptroller, City Hall aims to do the deal via the Economic Development Corp. — which is supposed to be fostering new jobs, not adding existing ones to the city’s payroll in a clear abuse of the contracting process.