The Expendable

IBT

An FDNY firefighter has died from a heart attack after he was fired as part of the city's initiative to allocate funds for its migrant crisis, leaving his widow and children struggling to run their home. Derek Floyd, 36, suffered cardiac arrest and died on April 15, just four months after the city fired him as part of a budget crunch to fund migrant services.

Floyd was one of the about 10 Fire Department employees categorized under the "long term duty" — people either injured on the job and assigned office work or absent due to prolonged illness. They were terminated just weeks before Christmas, as per sources within the FDNY.

Floyd's death has left his grieving widow, along with his six-year-old son Ethan and two-year-old daughter Abigail, facing the daunting possibility of being unable to afford their home.

Floyd, a veteran who completed three tours in the Middle East with the Marines, had been assigned to a desk job within the Fire Department chaplain's office because he had suffered another heart attack in 2019 while he was in the Fire Academy.

 While working in the chaplain's office on modified duty, Floyd helped coordinate the funerals of deceased FDNY members.

Despite being a married father of two young children, he was striving to get medical clearance to return to active duty as a firefighter before his termination.

Floyd was close to qualifying for additional medical benefits for his family and over $600,000 worth of death benefits when he was dismissed, leaving his family without any support despite his years of service.

Following his dismissal from the FDNY, Floyd found a job with a non-profit organization helping veterans. However, the salary was a lot lower than what he earned with the FDNY, the benefits were limited, and the demanding hours prevented him from spending time with his 6-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

"He used to be so present for, like, our kids and stuff," Cristine said. "Being a firefighter was something he was really passionate about. He was really a big-time, like, family person, he was all about his kids.

"If Derek would have stayed on, he would have had a life insurance policy with the FDNY. That would have helped out financially because right now, it's really bad. I'm honestly swimming in a lot of debt," his grieving widow revealed.

Mayor Adams's migrant debit card debacle

 

 NY Post

It takes money to make money, as the old saying goes, and, apparently, it also takes money — as much as $53 million — to give money away.

Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Adams is giving out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.

Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and his administration has for nearly a month failed to correct several public misperceptions about it.

One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50 million to migrants.

No wonder the mayor has been reticent.

This debit-card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multi-billion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.

It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.

When The Post exposed the mayor’s debit-card program earlier this month, the mayor’s office spun it as a money-saving program, to solve a problem: migrants staying in hotels don’t eat all their food.

DocGo, the city’s no-bid “emergency” contractor to provide migrants with three meals a day, throws away up to 5,000 meals daily, wasting $7.2 million a year.

Some food is inedible — expired or rotten — and other food doesn’t meet migrants’ dietary needs.

Providing mass-scale meals competently and with options for specific needs — halal, kosher, vegan, non-gluten — isn’t that hard: the school system does it, airlines do it, hospitals and jails do it.

It wouldn’t be that difficult for the city to solve this problem: on-site city auditors could refuse to pay for meals that are objectively inedible, with visible mold, for example, or with expired labeling.

Instead of assuring that it’s existing no-bid “emergency” contractor fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid “emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for waste, fraud, and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.

Which vendors did the city’s Housing Preservation & Development consider for this contract, as qualified to provide this complex financial service?

New York City is home to hundreds of top-tier financial-services and public-benefits providers, a dream of a competitive bidding pool, to ensure that the city gets a good price, as well as strong protections against fraud and abuse.

But HPD considered only one: Newark-based Mobility Capital Finance, which also has an office in Harlem.

MoCaFi was founded by Wole Coaxum, a former managing director at JPMorgan Chase, who said the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 inspired him to serve the “underbanked” and “narrow the racial wealth gap.”

How did HPD choose Mobility Capital? The contract makes it quite clear: MoCaFi was “referred to HPD by City Hall.”

What kind of experience did MoCaFi bring to this complex endeavor?

None. As HPD helpfully notes, on a “listing of prior / related emergency large contracts,” MoCaFi is “a new provider of emergency services for HPD.”

MoCaFi’s only city experience, HPD notes, is small-scale support of the city’s participatory-budget program.

The company’s broader nationwide experience is as a “platform” for pre-paid third-party debit cards and bank accounts, marketed to minorities.

The only clue is from a stray off-the-cuff comment Adams made at a reception earlier this month, calling MoCaFi a minority business “that we met on the campaign trail. . . . Little did we know that God is going to say there’s going to be a crisis, you’re going to have to meet them. . . . And it’s going to cost us money” to “put investment . . . in our community.”

 A year ago, the Adams administration was already eager to find something for MoCaFi to do.

Last year, the director of the mayor’s fund to advance New York City — a slush fund powered by anonymous private donors — raised at one of the fund’s board meetings the concept of “an upcoming partnership with the mayor’s office . . . and MoCaFi . . . on a universal basic income project”: that is, giving poorer New Yorkers (not migrants) cash.

 Coaxum seems to have become part of the mayor’s orbit, and even provided a quote to an official City Hall press release praising Adams’ founding of a new “Office of Engagement.”

 

The World's intake center

NY Post

 Queens is bearing the brunt of the Big Apple Migrant Crisis, with more settling in the borough than anywhere else in the city, immigration court data shows.

At least 39,131 migrants listed a Queens address on their initial paperwork upon entering the country this fiscal year through through the end of August, edging out Brooklyn, where at least 36,579 migrants planned to settle, according to stats tracked by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonprofit at Syracuse University.

At least 18,910 and 16,151 migrants indicated they would be staying in the Bronx and Manhattan respectively, and 2,462 said they were headed to Staten Island, the data shows.

Meanwhile, the number of incoming migrants coming to Queens and Brooklyn are surging, with nearly 10,000 declaring their intention to move to Queens, and just under 9,000 heading to Brooklyn, in July and August alone.

“I don’t see it slowing down as much as people think it will,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. said. “This problem is not going to go away anytime soon.”

“Before we saw this we were dealing with a housing crisis, so we had 40,000 New Yorkers in shelters, and of course with this crisis it just exacerbates that issue,” he said.