Dear New Yorkers,
They were the back-up ventilators created to help health care workers at the worst of the pandemic in New York.
Taxpayers paid $12 million for 3,000 “bridge vents” in April 2020. But the majority of them sat unopened and unused in a warehouse — and all were quietly sold at auction last month for $24,600. Total.
That’s $8 per ventilator, THE CITY found as part of an investigation of city government’s efforts to auction off millions of dollars worth of COVID-related supplies that officials have decided are no longer needed.
The big sell-off now comes after the de Blasio administration waived the usual oversight of city contracts at the start of the pandemic. In an internal email obtained by THE CITY sent last summer, when COVID cases were rising, a top official in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams fretted that if the public learned about the auctions, it would prompt an inquiry "about the city's over-buying during COVID."
Read more here.
Some other items of note: - After you drop it in a bin, what happens to our food waste? THE CITY followed food scraps and organic material from curbs to DSNY’s Staten Island compost facility and the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. See our visual tour of each step in the process.
- All is not right with Right to Counsel, the city law designed to give legal representation to tenants facing eviction. While thousands go without a lawyer, tenant groups are calling foul on the Office of Civil Justice for scheduling its annual public hearing on Friday night. Meanwhile, today and tomorrow, more than 250 attorneys, paralegals and other staffers from the New York Legal Assistance Group – many of whom work on Right to Counsel cases – plan to walk off the job, demanding pay raises and a better union contract.
- Event alert: On Thursday night at 7 p.m., THE CITY and BRIC Media will co-host Healing with Housing: Decriminalizing the Unhoused & Mentally Ill, a panel discussion of solutions for New Yorkers struggling with mental illness. The free event will be livestreamed on YouTube here.
- See how New York City is doing with our newsroom’s economic recovery tracker.
- For the latest local numbers on COVID-19 vaccinations, testing rates and more, check our coronavirus tracker.
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