de Blasio's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications; plenty of city money that's in the wrong hands

NY Daily News

The city’s scandal-scarred tech agency was overcharged millions for an electronic procurement system, according to an investigative watchdog.

Ivalua Inc. was first hired by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications in 2016 to come up with a a system that allows 40 city agencies to buy products and services online.

In the years since, the contract has ballooned from $30.5 million to a whopping $46.9 million, the watchdog Checks and Balances Project found. The city has spent $27.5 million on the contract so far.

A similar system made for Dallas, Texas, cost just under $50,000 a year, according to documents obtained by the watchdog and shared with the Daily News.

“It appears new York City taxpayers were ripped off,” said Scott Peterson, executive director of Checks and Balances Project.

 Ivalua, a software company founded in 2000 and headquartered in California, had no prior experience contracting with American governments before it was chosen to build New York’s e-procurement system.

The city said Ivalua had worked with public sector clients in France. After being hired by New York, Ivalua secured more public contracts in Arizona, Ohio and Maryland.

The system Ivalua is constructing is intended to streamline and shorten the city’s procurement process – making it easier for dozens of agencies to buy goods and services from more than 11,000 vendors.

 Two years after the contract began in April 2016, Ivalua’s design still hadn’t been completed, an internal 2018 document obtained by Peterson shows. But the cost for the Procurement and Sourcing 

Solutions Portal – dubbed PASSPort – still went up by $15 million.

Ivalua did not respond to an email seeking comment Friday. Phone calls to the company went unanswered.

The city insisted Ivalua’s product has been a success so far – even through it’s not finished.

Partying like it's 1975

From Crains:

Mayor Bill de Blasio portrays his preliminary $89 billion budget as a fiscally responsible plan to make the city a fairer place—his No. 1 priority—and to meet the demands of the city’s growth (the very first chart in his budget summary shows the increase in the city’s population, which reached 8.5 million in 2016).

He certainly has spent a lot of money in pursuit of those goals.

The $89 billion figure represents an increase of $16.5 billion from the last Bloomberg budget, according to figures from the Citizens Budget Commission that adjust the numbers for the rollover of surpluses, intergovernment transfers and reserves. The percentage increase is 22.7%, which is more than double the rate of inflation during the period. If he had merely kept pace with inflation, the budget would be a little over $80 billion—a big difference.

The Citizens Budget Commission and others have criticized the mayor for not protecting the city from the three major threats it faces: the prospect of significant budget cuts from the federal government, which sends the city something on the order of $7 billion a year; the potential loss of millionaire taxpayers to other states because of the impact of the Republican tax bill; and the fact that the city’s amazing economic boom, which next month will set a modern record for its length, will come to an end sooner rather than later.

BIG budget approved early

From Crains:

The City Council approved an early $85.2 billion budget for its 2018 fiscal year Tuesday, the last under term-limited Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

The council added funding for summer jobs and a property tax exemption for veterans to Mayor Bill de Blasio's fiscal agenda but for the most part avoided the elaborate "budget dance" that involved the proposed removal and subsequent restoration of certain expenditures, a practice Blasio vowed to end. It was the earliest budget the council has delivered in 20 years, according to City Councilman Fernando Cabrera, D-Bronx.

But while the mayor and speaker declined a dance, they stepped into the ring on the issue of legal help for immigrants. The council added a provision ensuring universal representation regardless of criminal history; the mayor wants certain immigrants blocked from services.

AirTrain is unnecessary spending

From the Village Voice:

At last week’s board meeting, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unveiled its latest $32 billion, 10-year spending blueprint — a document carefully calibrated not to consider the region’s need for new infrastructure, but to appease governors on both sides of the Hudson.

The governors, of course, appoint the Port’s commissioners and, bridge scandals notwithstanding, continue to pull the strings at the authority. Unfortunately, using the Port Authority to dole out money to gubernatorial pet projects does nothing to help commuters stuck with a dysfunctional regional transportation system.

Two big examples show how the latest Christie-Cuomo spending plan got it all wrong.

First up: dubious airport rail projects favored by both governors are getting funded in a suspicious quid pro quo. Nearly $1.5 billion would go to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s LaGuardia-Willets Point AirTrain, which transit experts say will actually take longer than existing bus service.

Way too much money going to shelter operators

From the Daily News:

Ponder Mayor de Blasio’s priorities — and the goods he is buying with spiraling outlays on serving the homeless. The rapidly rising figures are astonishing.

All together, the mayor will spend $1.7 billion on homelessness this year, a whopping 46% more than just two years ago.

For context, $1.7 billion is more than the city spends annually to pick up and dispose garbage, run the fire department or keep the city’s drinking water clean.

That amount includes $1.3 billion to run shelters, an outlay larger than the city spends on parks, senior centers, libraries and cultural institutions combined.