Maybe New York can run a giant garage sale.
A comprehensive review of waste in city government has uncovered an astounding 8,000 unused desks sitting in offices — just one of numerous money drains on taxpayers that include a 26,000-vehicle fleet maintained in 126 separate repair shops and dozens of duplicative human-resources departments that cost $410 million a year.
The vacant desks represented 11 percent of the city’s entire inventory.
“Keep in mind we have 300,000 employees,” Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday. “So if you do the math, it’s not a big percentage. But it’s a waste of money. They’re not all in one building. They’re spread out.”
Officials offered lots of reasons why the vacant desks were able to multiply over the years.
Employees left and weren’t replaced, while their spaces were left untouched. Agencies ramped up for new initiatives with, say, 50 extra employees — but only 25 arrived. Some desks provided convenient storage space in cramped quarters, so there was no incentive to give them up.
“It was 20 here, five there,” said one city official. “It’s not like there was an entire floor with empty desks.”
The Department of Housing Preservation & Development took the prize for the single biggest cluster of empties — about 100 — on one of its sprawling floors at 100 Gold St., which houses several hundred desks.
Mind boggling as that is, it pales in comparison to some of the other inefficiencies rooted out by recently named Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, whom Bloomberg assigned to come up with innovative ways to consolidate and modernize the government.
In his first sweep, Goldsmith focused on five areas, from real-estate management to fleet operations, where he said $500 million could be saved over four years. Cutting 1.2 million square feet of office space alone would save $36 million a year, he said.
In recounting why the city is devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to an automated — and long overdue — timekeeping system, Bloomberg described the astonishingly backward method used by the NYPD to pay cops.
“Each timesheet has to be delivered in a squad car with two officers in it to 1 Police Plaza,” he explained. “The error rate [on the timesheets] is about 30 percent. Then the mistakes have to be driven back to the precinct, corrected, and then driven back to 1 Police Plaza.”
The mayor estimated that enacting Goldsmith’s reforms would eliminate about 3,000 jobs through attrition, especially in human resources.
Officials determined that the city has one HR employee for every 38 city workers. The private industry norm is 1 to 95.
“You have 50 different HR offices enforcing exactly the same policies,” noted one official.
Goldsmith called the city’s fleet of 26,000 vehicles perhaps the largest of any municipality in the world, and questioned why it was necessary to have 126 repair shops.
Officials discovered one NYPD repair shop directly across the street from a Sanitation Department shop.
Consolidating all the shops could save $71 million a year.
Asked why the city hadn’t moved earlier to achieve such savings, the mayor said, “You can’t do everything overnight. We have saved a lot. But there’s an awful lot more.”