Wednesday, April 6, 2022

de Blasio's boondoggle COVID hotel inmate shelter security contract deemed antiquated by elected officials

  A hotel in Fresh Meadows, Queens was being used to house former inmates, March 2, 2022.

THE CITY

Since the start of the pandemic, 1,700 inmates released from city jails and state prisons have stayed in hotel rooms at taxpayers’ expense, including more than 200 who have been checked in for more than a year, according to new data obtained by THE CITY.

THE CITY previously reported on the dramatic expansion of the program run by Exodus Transitional Community, including at a Fresh Meadows, Queens, hotel where a former inmate alleged she was sexually assaulted by an Exodus employee. THE CITY also found that the security firm hired by Exodus operated without the required state license.

Now, Queens elected officials are demanding that Mayor Eric Adams pull the plug on Exodus, which has run the hotel-release program since 2020 and which recently scored a new $40 million deal.

U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, Assemblymember Nily Rozic and Councilmember Linda Lee — all Democrats — wrote to Adams Monday demanding that he reevaluate the effort, which began in an attempt to curb the spread of COVID.

“It has been nearly two years now, COVID-19 rates are at the lowest they have been since last summer and these disturbing reports by THE CITY make it imperative that the contract be terminated immediately,” they wrote.

Last week, two years after the program started, there were still 800 former inmates staying in six hotels scattered across the city, and the mayor’s office could not say how much money has been spent to date on hotel rooms alone.

 peaking with THE CITY Tuesday, Rozic stated, “Our understanding is the housing situation was always intended to be temporary and always contingent on there being a pandemic. Because there’s no metric, they’ve been able to extend and extend no matter how many times we ask them to provide us with an end date.”

Rozic noted that “this state of emergency narrative is what the city hid behind for the hotel to be used,” and added: “We’re ending all sorts of other [pandemic-related] protocols and for one reason or another this one hasn’t ended.”

And though city officials said the hotel program would end once the state of emergency was over, Adams aims to keep it going, even as it’s no longer designated as pandemic related.

The Queens officials pointed to an August 2020 letter to them from Elizabeth Glazer, then-director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, who wrote, speaking of the Wyndham hotel in Fresh Meadows: “There are no future plans for use of this hotel beyond the COVID-19 response.”

THE CITY found that the initial COVID contract with the non-profit Exodus Transitional Community to run the program expired in December, but Mayor Eric Adams awarded a second contract in January as a way of “keeping 800 people from flooding the homeless system,” according to mayoral spokesperson Jonah Allon.

That decision contrasts with an effort that began nine months ago in the de Blasio administration to begin moving homeless shelter residents out of hotels where they’d been placed during the pandemic back into shelters as part of the effort to re-open the city.

This falls right in line with Adams keeping mask mandates for toddlers and allowing employers to extort their employees into getting vaccinated. But they are saying nothing about those systems that also abuse pandemic protocols.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOL@ if you voted for deBozio this is what you voted for.

Anonymous said...

I feel so sorry for all the sheeple living this lunacy in New York Shity.

NPC_translator said...

That's the fun thing about government. Once a program starts, it takes an act of God to stop it. It just becomes a perpetual motion machine, sucking up grift dollars and doing something either useless or actively harmful, yet never doing the slightest good.

It boggles the mind how much money is flushed down the sewers on useless nonsense. Unless you live in The Hole, then the money is thrown into the septic tank.

Anonymous said...

They need to bring back mental institutions heavily in this state. Im not talking about the abusive ones like back in the day but im talking more about rehabilitation ones. They need to start locking the insane people up again. And then they also should bring back the death penalty. And those homeless that don't come from this state, need to get shipped back to the other state or country they came from. Nyc is bad and its only getting worst. These idiot politicians need to stop listening to stupid ass protestors saying that everything is "cruel, racist or sexist". We are allowing the mentally challenged to run around in the streets and stab people and rob people and push people. Why is it so cruel to want to protect those who are good members of society? I say bring back the death penalty, bring back mental institutions in large capacity (and I suggest putting it right next door to hochuls house) and start deporting people or sending people back to their ORIGINAL home states.

Anonymous said...

Is Eric going to fix this ? Allow public debate ?
The Electurds now have unprecedented accumulation of power over speech and the narrative control threatens not only access to the public square, but the integrity of it.
Prove Me Wrong...