Mayor Zohran Mamdani stonewalled Tuesday on handing over details of more than $12 billion in Department of Education contracts — a day before a City Council deadline to share documents or else face a subpoena.
Hizzoner contended officials needed time to redact sensitive information in the documents pointedly demanded by Council Speaker Julie Menin in a scathing letter last week.
“The City Council will have these contracts in the coming weeks, and, you know, the long-standing New York City public school posture has been that when sharing contracts with an external body, that they would go through a vendor review and a redaction process,” he said during an unrelated press conference with Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani stonewalled Tuesday on handing over details of more than $12 billion in Department of Education contracts — a day before a City Council deadline to share documents or else face a subpoena. James Keivom for NY Post
“We know that the Council is an oversight body. We are looking to expedite that process as quickly as possible.”
Menin, in her letter threatening to subpoena the records from the department, accused Samuels and the DOE of a “pattern of opacity, slow-walking and delay” in responding to the request.
The Council’s audit in March first requested information on 579 contracts — 227 of them “related to mandated programming, including related services, assistive technology and interpretation and transcription services” and 352 “that DOE has itself identified as ‘not competitively bid.’”
“As you know, DOE spends $12.9 billion on outside contracting every year,” she wrote, noting it “strains all credulity” to claim the department, which has a nearly $40 billion budget, didn’t have the staffing to pull the info together and provide it to the Council.
Hizzoner contended officials need time to redact sensitive information in the documents, as he spoke in an unrelated press conference with Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels (pictured second from left). James Keivom for NY Post
Samuels himself faces a probe for inking a $180,000 no-bid contract with an unapproved vendor when he served as a district superintendent.
Menin’s letter didn’t specifically ask for information on Samuels’ alleged chicanery, but focused on months of stymied requests.
“This troubling pattern of opacity, slow-walking, and delay impedes the Council’s ability to exercise its oversight function, including its review of DOE’s compliance with mandated service obligations and no-bid procurement rules—both matters of significant public interest given the volume and cost of the contracts at issue,” the letter states.
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The missive gave the DOE a Wednesday deadline to provide a timeline of when officials will cough up the documents.
The law requires the Council to exhaust all legal avenues before issuing a subpoena — and much of Menin’s letter is devoted to exhaustively listing all the various unfilled requests for information going back to March.
“It strains all credulity to say that DOE does not have the staff and technical ability to download these contracts into a file and make them available to the Council,” Menin’s letter seethes.
“As I stated at the June budget hearing, downloading the contracts to a file and providing them to the Council should constitute no more than a few hours of work.”
Mamdani, when asked if his administration will meet the deadline, refused to be pinned down on when the DOE would finally comply.
“I think the focus here is making sure that we’re operating in accordance with the law and that legal review is the focus of a lot of our efforts right now,” he said.
Mamdani and Samuels were announcing $67.5 million in funding for certain pre-K programs during their Tuesday presser.