City Council Speaker Julie Menin is escalating a transparency fight with the Department of Education, accusing the agency of months of “opacity, slow-walking, and delay” after it failed to turn over hundreds of contracts tied to mandated school services and no-bid procurement.
In a July 9 letter to Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, seen by amNewYork, Menin demanded that DOE provide a production schedule by July 16 for 579 contracts the Council has sought for months.
The request includes 227 contracts related to mandated programming, including related services, assistive technology, and interpretation and transcription services, as well as 352 contracts DOE itself identified as “not competitively bid.”
“Despite repeated requests over several months, DOE has not produced these contracts, nor has it proposed a concrete timeline for doing so,” Menin wrote.
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to amNewYork’s request for comment Thursday.
The dispute centers on the Council’s oversight of DOE contracting, an area Menin said carries significant public interest because of the agency’s large outside spending and the services involved. In the letter, Menin said DOE spends $12.9 billion a year on outside contracting.
“This troubling pattern of opacity, slow-walking, and delay impedes the Council’s ability to exercise its oversight function, including its review of DOE’s compliance with mandated service obligations and no-bid procurement rules,” Menin wrote.
School contract letter adds to City Council-DOE friction
The letter marks the latest escalation in a months-long back-and-forth between the Council and DOE over the records. Menin said the Council first requested copies of 227 mandated-service contracts during a March 23 preliminary budget hearing, when DOE’s chief procurement officer pledged to “work and figure out” how to get the contracts to lawmakers.
The Council followed up in April with written requests for contract documents for the mandated services and for current DOE contracts procured outside the request-for-proposals process or otherwise considered no-bid. According to Menin’s letter, DOE and the Office of Management and Budget later told the Council they would get back to lawmakers on the contract questions.
On June 3, the DOE sent the Council 60 Requests for Authorization, or RAs, rather than the contracts themselves, Menin wrote. The documents are short public summaries of contracts that include information such as terms, costs, procurement methods and the goods or services being contracted.
At a June 8 executive budget hearing, Menin, Council Finance Chair Lee and Education Chair Eric Dinowitz pressed DOE officials over the agency’s failure to produce the contracts. Samuels said the agency was “looking at what it would take to supply more than 600 contracts in detail to the Council,” according to Menin’s letter.
DOE’s chief procurement officer cited a “resource-constrained environment” and said it could take “months” to pull the contracts because they are housed in a secure system to which “very few people” have access, Menin wrote.
Menin rejected that explanation in her letter, arguing that the Council was not asking DOE to conduct a detailed review of the contracts, but simply to provide copies.
“DOE carries the largest budget of any city agency,” she wrote. “It strains all credulity to say that DOE does not have the staff and technical ability to download these contracts into a file and make them available to the Council.”
Menin also noted that the Council could issue a subpoena for the records.
DOE staff and senior Council staff met virtually on June 25 to discuss the contracts, according to the letter. At that meeting, DOE again raised staffing and technical concerns and also said vendors may need to be notified before contracts are shared so they can seek redactions of sensitive information.
Later that day, DOE sent RA documents in folders labeled “Aggregate RA Docs,” “Mandated,” “Mandated and Non-Competitive,” and “Non-Competitive,” Menin wrote. But she said the scope of those categories remains unclear, and DOE has not provided the full contracts.
The fight follows broader scrutiny of the city’s procurement system.
amNewYork previously reported that advocates and lawmakers have raised concerns about the DOE’s separate procurement process, including the limited transparency around school contracts and the use of smaller contracts that avoid higher levels of review.
Education Chair Dinowitz said that DOE contracts need more oversight, saying, “For a third of the city’s budget, we should be able to review contracts more quickly.”
Education advocates have also criticized DOE’s handling of contract records. Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, previously told amNewYork that DOE contracts “are not private documents” and said the Council’s inability to obtain them was “a much bigger scandal” than any single contracting controversy.
In her letter, Menin asked the DOE to provide a proposed production schedule and a point of contact to coordinate the release of the contracts by July 16.
“I look forward to working with DOE to resolve this matter promptly,” she wrote.
