It’s vendor bender!
Blaz blames deal flop for failure to launch car seizures
Add botched vendor contract negotiations to Mayor de Blasio’s list of excuses for not implementing a City Council law designed to impound cars owned by dangerous drivers such as one blamed for killing a 3-month-old baby girl last week in Brooklyn.
“There was certainly some issue with a private vendor we were dealing with,” de Blasio said of the delay during a news conference Thursday.
De Blasio was speaking of city Transportation Department efforts last spring to hire a company to conduct driver safety courses that are required by the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement bill, which de Blasio signed in February 2020.
The department put out for bid a contract for the classes earlier this year, setting an April 27 deadline for submissions. Nearly five months later, the city hasn’t inked a deal.
“It’s a tortured tale because it’s caught up in COVID and caught up in crisis, but it’s something we are absolutely committed to moving right away,” the mayor said.
The driver safety courses are supposed to be mandatory for the owners of cars with at least 15 speeding tickets or five red light camera tickets in a 12-month period — but they still haven’t commenced.
De Blasio didn’t include funding for the reckless driver program in his May 2020 executive budget, which was proposed three months after the reckless motorist legislation passed but as the COVID-19 pandemic cratered the city’s finance.
Earlier this week, the mayor blamed the problems on the city Transportation Department.
“We’re just doing this now,” de Blasio said of the driver classes during his Thursday news conference. “It will be up and running shortly.”
Under the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement law, cars with enough tickets would be impounded by the city sheriff’s office if the owner does not complete the safety course within 30 days of receiving notice they’ve met the threshold.
Tyrik Mott — the man charged with killing the infant, Apolline Mong-Guillemin, in a hit-and-run crash Saturday in Clinton Hill — drove a 2017 Honda Civic that was involved in 160 traffic violations since 2017, including 35 speeding tickets and five red-light tickets so far in 2021.
Officials intended the classes be run by National Center for Civic Innovation, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Fund for the City of New York.
But negotiations with the nonprofit fell through, said Transportation spokeswoman Alana Morales.
“We have discontinued negotiations with them,” Morales said. “We moved the program in-house to ensure that issues relating to the vendor would not delay the program beyond the original timeline.”
Morales declined to say when the negotiations broke down. Representatives from the Fund for the City of New York did not respond to requests for comment.
The city wanted the nonprofit to run 90- to 120-minute courses with up to 15 people per class that cover “a combination of exploring driver behavior and a restorative justice model about the community impact of dangerous driving,” bid documents show.
The classes give a quiz, and follow up with attendees one to three months later to “conduct self-reporting of behaviors.”
Before the bid closed, one prospective vendor raised concerns the classes were too short. The two-hour limit is less than half as long as the five-hour safety course the state requires for new drivers before they take a road test to get their license.
“NYC DOT believes two hours is sufficient to communicate the necessary information and hold the attention of attendees,” city officials responded.
City officials estimated in the bid documents roughly 5,000 drivers would be required to take the courses each year, enough to fill about 400 classes.
Now those classes will be run by Transportation Department staffers — and officials said they would launch by the end of the year.
Officials said cars will not be seized under the reckless driving program until next year, two years after the law passed.