REMARKS
Council Member Gale A. Brewer's opening remarks on oversight of homeless shelter providers
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3 min
Council Member Gale A. Brewer opens the joint committee hearing on oversight of city-funded homeless shelter providers and introduces Intro 979. She provides context on the city's homeless shelter system, recent DOI findings on compliance issues, and the purpose of the hearing.
- Brewer highlights the scale of NYC's homeless shelter system, serving 86,000 people nightly across 500 shelters with a $4 billion budget.
- She references a 2024 DOI report that found issues with conflicts of interest, nepotism, and excessive executive compensation among shelter providers.
- Brewer expresses interest in examining the city's progress on implementing DOI recommendations and understanding why some were rejected.
Gale A. Brewer
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So good morning, everyone.
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I am Gail Brewer, chair of the committee on oversight and investigations.
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I would like to welcome my co chairs for the hearing, the chair of general welfare committee, deputy speaker Diana Aiella, the chair of the finance committee, council member Justin Brannen, and contracts committee chair, council member Julie Won, as well as colleagues who have joined us, council members Salam, Lewis, and Hudson.
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Today, the committees will be examining the Merrill administration's oversight of city funded homeless shelter providers and legislation sponsored by council member Juan, which is known as intro 979.
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I think everyone knows that the city spends 1,000,000,000 of dollars providing shelter to their credit to homeless individuals or unhoused individuals, currently serving an average of 86,000 people each night in over 500 shelters.
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Spending for the Department of Homeless Services, which oversees the shelter system, hit an all time high of 4,000,000,000 in f y two four.
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DHS directly runs a few of these shelter facilities, but the majority are run by nonprofit service providers under contract with DHS under the oversight of DHS.
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As part of contracts with DHS, providers agree to comply with fiscal management and governance requirements set by the city.
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In October of this year, 2024, the Department of Investigation, known as DOI, released a report after an extensive review of the compliance risks of 51 nonprofit service providers that operate a majority of the city's homeless shelters.
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The report, which was a follow-up to one that was done in 21, found numerous cases of conflicts of interest related third party transactions, nepotism, noncompliance with competitive bidding requirements, and excessive executive compensation, which is really hard to understand.
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In order to address this,
UNKNOWN
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DOI made 32 policy and procedure recommendations to address
Gale A. Brewer
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these system wide vulnerabilities, recommendations that DOI first made as part of their 2021 report that I mentioned.
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In response, the Department of Social Services and the Department of Homeless Services and MOCS, which is the agency that governs much of this in terms of day to day passport, etcetera, accepted partially accepted or rejected the recommendations.
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We look forward today to finding out what progress has been made in implementing the recommendations the agency has accepted and examining why the agency rejected some of the DOI recommendations.
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I wanna just mention, when looking at the one that seemed most egregious to me was when it says TBA or there's no listing of a contractor or subcontractor, that should be rejected.
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On the other hand, I'm very conscious of the fact that it's hard to get the city to pay, and what you don't want is agencies not to be paid as a result of the money that's already been allocated by the nonprofit.
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So it's a hard issue to address.
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I'm aware of that.
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I'm big on AI.
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I think we solve all your problems in that aspect.
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I wanna thank the committee staff, Nicole Catada, Alex Yablon, and here, Erica Cohen, for their work in putting this hearing together, as well as Sam Goldsmith, who is the communications and policy director in my office.
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I will now turn this hearing over to chair Ayala to give her opening statement and then others will follow.
