New York City Failed to Halt Major Overspending on Migrants, Audit Finds
The New York Times
An audit by the city comptroller, Brad Lander, found that a city agency allowed a troubled contractor to bill for unnecessary expenses like unused hotel rooms.
Last year, as Mayor Eric Adams sought to relieve the pressure on New York City’s shelter system, he began to send hundreds of asylum seekers to hotels, often in counties north of the city.
But in many cases, the city spent taxpayer funds for rooms that were never used. In Rockland County, the city’s primary migrant-services contractor, DocGo, billed the city $833,340 for 4,902 vacant rooms over 61 nights, according to an audit the city comptroller is set to release on Tuesday.
The audit by the comptroller, Brad Lander, concluded that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development had failed to exercise sufficient oversight of a no-bid $432 million contract given to DocGo, a firm that has come under scrutiny for its handling of migrant services.
The rooms in Rockland County were booked at the Armoni Inn and Suites in Orangeburg, N.Y. At the time, a temporary restraining order had been issued that prohibited the use of the Armoni for migrants from the city. Yet DocGo held the empty rooms and the city paid for them.
DocGo also charged the city $569,500 to rent out the Crowne Plaza JFK Hotel in Queens for 10 nights, even though not a single room was used over that period, auditors said.
City housing officials said they viewed the extra rooms as “planned insurance” to guard against a situation where the demand for emergency housing unexpectedly rose, and that they saw no reason to seek a refund because the steps taken were necessary in the midst of an unprecedented migrant crisis.
