The speaker of the New York City Council on Thursday ratcheted up pressure on the leader of the city\u2019s public schools, accusing him of failing to comply with her request to provide copies of hundreds of contracts with outside companies and offering nothing but excuses.<\/p>\n
In a scathing letter, Julie Menin, the speaker, told Kamar Samuels, the schools chancellor, that the city\u2019s Department of Education had shown a \u201cpattern of opacity, slow-walking and delay\u201d in responding to her request, first made in March, for 579 contracts with companies that provide goods and services, including those that supply speech therapists and counselors. The department spends more than $12 billion a year on contracts.<\/p>\n
Ms. Menin said that officials at the Department of Education \u2014 which has an annual budget of roughly $40 billion, the largest of any city agency \u2014 have blamed staffing shortages and technical challenges for the delay. She noted that the Council could subpoena the records from the department, which would represent a significant escalation in her efforts to obtain them.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt strains all credulity to say that D.O.E. does not have the staff and technical ability to download these contracts into a file and make them available to the Council,\u201d Ms. Menin wrote. \u201cDownloading the contracts to a file and providing them to the Council should constitute no more than a few hours of work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said that department officials had been working with the speaker\u2019s office for months and had provided a list of companies with contracts and their dollar amounts.<\/p>\n
Ms. Lyle said that the speaker\u2019s request was especially burdensome and would require department lawyers to spend thousands of hours reviewing millions of pages of contracts in order to redact proprietary information.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been clear that this would be an extremely laborious thing to do,\u201d Ms. Lyle said. \u201cIt would require a massive amount of time in the legal office, and time would be better spent delivering for students.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Samuels, who started in the position in January, has already faced scrutiny for his role in awarding a no-bid contract in his former role as superintendent of schools on Manhattan\u2019s West Side. Some City Council members have become increasingly frustrated that the Department of Education has not been more forthcoming and have criticized Mr. Samuels\u2019s leadership of the largest school district in the United States.<\/p>\n