How about that: The Post just caught the Bowery Residents’ Committee once again failing to do its contracted work of “counseling” subway homeless into shelters — half a year after an audit by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli slammed the nonprofit for persistently delivering far less than its contracts with the city and the MTA require.
Post reporters found the BRC office at Penn Station closed and its workers nowhere to be found. They then learned that the nonprofit shut it down “indefinitely” on Saturday after a vagrant who’s still at large made a death threat. So much for BRC’s contract with the MTA and Amtrak to do outreach in the transit hub.
Workers say they put up a sign directing homeless wanting help to an office eight blocks away. If so, someone tore it down — indeed, we found several homeless sleeping on the office’s doorstep. Surely it would’ve made more sense to just beef up security at the office — it’s not like security firepower is scarce at Penn.
Anyway, Penn was packed with homeless long before Saturday: people always sleeping on the floor, all over the station. It seems obvious that every branch of government has given up on stopping the station from becoming a flophouse.
Both the city and the MTA set up Corrective Action Plans for BRC in the wake of DiNapoli’s report in July. Simply voiding the contract then, they claim, would’ve left no one doing the work (or even pretending to) for weeks or longer until a new vendor could be hired — and vendors for this kind of work are hard to find.
Yet neither the city nor the MTA offered us hard numbers on how the CAPs are working or how closely BRC is now monitored — even though the group is a key part of the city’s plans to get homeless out of the subways.
Sorry: This all reeks of hopelessly low expectations, combined with the usual “it’s impossible to do better” shrugs. It’s long past time to re-examine the whole “nonprofit-industrial complex” that consumes tens of billions of dollars a year in the name of providing social services — many of which other US cities don’t even attempt to offer, with no ill effect.
If MTA and city leaders are told they effectively can’t fire nonprofits that don’t do their jobs, they should look at firing the people who insist on accepting the unacceptable.