After months of delay, the Adams administration’s Roosevelt Hotel welcome center on Monday is finally handing out its first debit cards to migrants staying at hotels, to buy food and baby supplies.
The city says it’s starting with 115 families, giving each family of four $350 a week over a six-week “pilot.”
This program still raises more questions than the city has answered.
Why the no-bid, single-vendor contract?
When the Adams team told the city’s Housing Preservation and Development Department in December that it had to use MoCaFi, a small-scale, New Jersey-based minority-owned vendor and not even consider any other firms, the reasoning was that it’s an emergency.
Taxpayers sure paid MoCaFi as if it were an emergency, handing the firm $574,000 in late January.
But Monday is April 1. So for the first three months of this contract — a full quarter of the contract’s year-long term — migrants didn’t see a dime.
Those three months, plus the months last year that the city spent drawing up its contract with MoCaFi, were plenty of time to do a competitive-bid process.
And it’s not like MoCaFi has some amazing secret capability no other firm has.
All the company is doing is handing the city pre-paid, restricted Mastercards to hand out.
Last week, when the mayor promised us bold new gun-detection technology in the subways, he vowed that over 90 days, competing firms could present ideas.
Why didn’t he similarly invite financial firms and benefit firms to propose plans to help migrants buy food?
How is the city choosing families to participate in the debit-card program?
A true pilot — to see if giving people these cards is cheaper than buying food for them, as the city insists it will be — would have randomly selected participants and a random control group.
Without a transparent process for lottery selection, the city risks favoritism — the city workers or contract workers pick their favorite families or people they think, after weeks of observation, are likely to be the most responsible.
If families can only buy food and baby supplies, as a top city official said last week, and if the cards can only be used at “bodegas, supermarkets, markets,” why doesn’t the city just buy these products wholesale?
The pilot’s purpose is, again, supposed to be saving money because the city’s food contractor throws away so much prepared food for migrants.
But core Manhattan, where migrant hotels are concentrated, isn’t exactly teeming with cheap supermarkets and baby-supply stores.
Plus, migrants don’t have cooking facilities or refrigerators in their rooms, so they’ll be highly limited in what items they can buy to economize.
Why doesn’t the city simply buy diapers, baby food, cereal and basic nonperishable food items, store them in a central location and let migrants “shop” for items there via voucher?
The city could even invite local vendors to offer choices of grab-and-go prepared food.
Giving people $350 a week to go to Manhattan bodegas and buy the most expensive baby food in the Western world doesn’t make tremendous sense from a money-saving point of view.
Do the debit cards go with the migrants if they leave city shelter?
It’s city policy to ask migrant families to reapply for shelter after 60 days.
But the city’s responsibility to provide migrants with three meals a day is part of the city’s responsibility to provide shelter.
In other words, once migrants leave city shelter, they must find their own food, too.
So if and when migrant families find their own housing after 60 days, will they be able to take their debit cards with them?
If not, Adams just created a huge reason for migrants to stall on leaving city-paid shelter.
A family of four that leaves a shelter, presuming that family would also leave its debit-card benefit behind, would be losing $1,400 a month.
If migrants won’t lose these debit-card benefits when they leave city shelter, isn’t the mayor just creating an open-ended benefit for people who, because of their immigration status or lack thereof, don’t qualify for federally funded food stamps?
Adams deputies are a little cautious about all this.
Last week, Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said that “we can take a look at it after six weeks and see what’s working and what’s not.”
Not Adams: “It’s a complete win,” he said on the radio last week.
For whom?
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.