City Hall moved rapidly Sunday to stop plans to spend up to $700 million on idle school buses through the end of June — rapidly, that is, after The Post’s Susan Edelman exposed the madness.
City Hall spokesperson Freddi Goldstein pretends Mayor Bill de Blasio simply wanted time to review the bus contracts that the Department of Education was poised to award — pleasing politically connected owners and the unions for bus drivers and matrons.
Mind you, the mayor already spends tens of millions a year beyond what city contracts require for some of those bus workers, purely as political payback.
With the city out upward of $7.4 billion in revenue from the coronavirus crisis, such giveaways are unconscionable. Nor will it encourage Congress to send the mayor a nickel of the billions he wants in aid.
Edelman notes other ongoing fiscal follies under Chancellor Richard Carranza, such as consulting contracts to hire new nurses when hundreds are already on the DOE payroll, idled by the lockdown. And $40 million for IBM to prep 300,000 iPads — when the DOE has already shelled out $189 million on those iPads.
Another eyebrow-raiser is a two-month, $1.2 million contract with Accenture to provide “management consulting” on COVID-19 issues. Huh? The city has an entire agency dedicated to emergency management, not to mention whole packs of managers at DOE HQ and City Hall.
Rather than facing the facts of this crisis, de Blasio and Carranza seem intent on continuing business-as-usual wherever they can get away with it. It’s simply shameful.
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