The no-bid micro contracts awarded to vendors at the center of a bribery scandal are rife with wildly inflated costs, an analysis finds.
How much does it cost NYCHA to change a lightbulb?
In one case, more than $708 per bulb.
That’s the rate the housing authority paid one vendor, who submitted a total bill of $4,250 to replace six LED bulbs and covers at Throggs Neck Houses in The Bronx, according to records reviewed by THE CITY.
Another vendor billed NYCHA $4,985 to replace one door to a compactor room. Yet another charged $4,875 to put in slip resistant rubber treads on a stairway with 15 steps — a cost of $325 per step.
When law enforcement officials arrested 70 current and former NYCHA workers on bribery charges earlier this month, they identified small no-bid contracts for apartment repairs, awarded to select vendors in exchange for cash to superintendents, as the source of corruption.
What prosecutors didn’t say was that many of the bills submitted by the vendors who win these so-called micro-purchase contracts raise serious questions about whether NYCHA wound up paying them hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of taxpayer dollars in inflated costs over the years.
All of these bills had one thing in common, a review of contract data by THE CITY found.
The vendors sought compensation as close to the maximum allowed at the time on each contract, regardless of the work performed. Micro contracts have a built-in incentive for vendors to bill for just below the maximum allowed — $5,000 until late 2019, $10,000 since — no matter what the scope and value of the task at hand is.
In the book “Highrisers”, which is about the Cabrini-Greens housing developement in Chicago, there’s a short section talking about how certain buildings were turned over to the tennents in a management capacity. It didn’t fix all of the problems, and it didn’t save Cabrini-Greens, but it did have some measure of success over beurocratic management by CHA, which was a joke. (FWIW I read this several years ago, so take it with a grain of salt)
That model has stuck out in my mind since. Why not have a simple budget for each building and let the work of maintenance be managed by the people who live there, with resources from the appropriate housing authority. The US is so fucking paternalistic about poverty and the people living in it. We build huge beurocracies incapable of truly scaling that then result in obsene waste like shown above. With some management some of that could be put on tennents, with them keeping some of benefits as well.