Ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio cooked books to hide $224M in NYC Ferry outlays: auditBy David Meyer and Bruce Golding
July 6, 2022
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio used accounting gimmicks to hide nearly $225 million he poured into the city’s costly ferry system — and forced taxpayers to shell out as much as $14.57 for each ride as overwhelmingly wealthy passengers paid just $2.75 a piece.
Those are the key findings of a blistering audit released Wednesday by city Comptroller Brad Lander.
In addition, de Blasio wasted $66 million — including $34 million in “questionable vessel acquisition costs” — as a result of bad decisions by his hand-picked officials in charge of the city’s Economic Development Corp., the 50-page report said.
Although the EDC reported spending $534 million to operate the ferries during the six and a half years that ended on Dec. 31, auditors uncovered a total of at least $758.5 million in ferry-related expenditures — a difference of $224.5 million, Lander said.
The undisclosed expenses — which included payments to various vendors and personnel costs — comprised $181 million in capital spending and $43.5 million in operating expenses, “obfuscating the actual cost of the NYC Ferry system,” according to the audit.
“If you just magically put your capital expenses below the line, you don’t have to show them — even though effectively it’s the same total set of costs in the system,” Lander said during a news conference at the NYC Ferry terminal in Manhattan’s Financial District.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/ex-mayor-bill-de-blasio-cooked-books-to-hide-224m-in-nyc-ferry-outlays/
