Thursday, 18 Apr 2024

Councilman will force NYC to disclose job creation if de Blasio won’t

If Mayor de Blasio wants to pat himself on the back for creating good jobs, he better be ready to prove they exist.

Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres told The Post he’ll introduce legislation forcing the city to regularly track and publicly disclose who’s benefiting from taxpayer-funded, job-creation programs unless the de Blasio administration sets the record straight on its $1.35 billion “New York Works” initiative.

Launched in June 2017, the program is supposed to create 100,000 jobs paying at least $50,000 yearly by 2027.

However, city officials concede they’ve poured $300 million into the program in nearly two years and only have 3,033 jobs to show for it. And they won’t say which companies scored the jobs or whether New Yorkers who need them the most are the one’s benefiting.

The lack of information has Torres concerned the program is producing jobs at an even slower pace than the city says it is.

“There’s no reason to suspect that the numbers are real,” said Torres, who chairs the Council’s Oversight and Investigations Committee.

“Projected jobs don’t put food on the table, and they don’t pay rent.”

The drama began during a Council hearing last month when James Patchett, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp., testified that the EDC-run program projects 19,000 jobs would be filled through $300 million spent on job training and infrastructure upgrades for companies that relocate or expand in the Big Apple.

However, when pressed further by Torres, Patchett conceded that roughly only 3,000 are actual jobs that are filled and the remaining 16,000 are mere projections.

Patchett also conceded under oath that he was unaware how many jobs went to low-income New Yorkers and that his agency isn’t tracking whether people landing the work actually live in the city.

Torres said EDC should be required to provide the public quick, easy access to information about any job it takes credit for creating.

But EDC and the Mayor’s Office have refused repeated requests by The Post to provide a detailed accounting of which businesses have beneftted through New York Works.

Instead, they provided the newspaper a vague spreadsheet showing 1,740 – or more than half – of the 3,033 jobs are based in at Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Much of the city-owned industrial park’s growth has come following the November 2017 opening of its massive “Building 77” complex that houses over a million square feet of light manufacturing businesses like food- and video-production companies.

EDC accounts for another 143 jobs at Brooklyn Army Terminal’s industrial park and 88 others at South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan, both of which are city-owned.

However, the agency won’t even provide the locations for the remaining 1,062 jobs.

Instead, the document only claims these jobs were created through various city-funded initiatives, including 225 via the city’s “Tech Talent Pipeline” training program aimed at getting college students work in the tech industry, and 254 through another training program called “ApprenticeNYC.”

When asked why the city won’t provide more details about New York Works, the Mayor’s Office said such data gets reported annually and that a “full progress report” would be “shared” in June.

“I get you want it faster, but we do it,” said de Blasio spokesman Eric Phillips.

Source: Read Full Article

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