As the de Blasio administration fends off numerous investigations of potential corruption, critics charge that it has repeatedly taken its eye off the ball when it comes to running the city.
Mayor Bill de Blasio had committed this year to reducing the use of hotels to house the homeless, but instead their use has more than doubled to 6,000 people.
The overall homeless population has similarly climbed by 20 percent since he took office in January 2014 — to a record high of 60,059 last week.
And de Blasio promised last year that single-family home repairs for damage caused by Superstorm Sandy would be completed by the end of 2016, but he abandoned that deadline last week as the completion rate stands at 44 percent.
“You get to a point where you start to say, ‘Look, New Yorkers, we have to pay attention to this because time and time again we are seeing mismanagement and no accountability — and we are fed up,’” said City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Queens).
She’s not the only official to question City Hall’s management.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly blamed the city’s “mismanagement” for the poor conditions of its homeless shelters and for the increasing homeless population.
When the administration was investigated for signing off on a real estate deal that netted a developer $72 million in profit, and which lost a neighborhood its decades-old health care facility, Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office pointed to mismanagement as the root cause.
“The checks and balances in place to avoid this kind of outcome were mismanaged,” his office concluded in an Aug. 1 report.
Even the mayor admitted to a bureaucratic bungle this month after The Post reported that nearly 300 municipal workers were awarded raises as high as 40 percent over the summer, only to be told last month that the city goofed and would likely need to revoke the raises.
“This was a bureaucratic foul-up is the bottom line,” the mayor said on Oct. 13.
Among the probes of the administration, the mayor’s shuttered nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, is under investigation by the US Attorney’s Office and the Manhattan district attorney over potential pay-to-play deals involving firms with city business.
Hizzoner’s fundraising on behalf of state Senate Democrats in 2014 is also being probed, as are a number of other deals, including the sale of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn in 2014.
To date, there have been no findings of wrongdoing on these issues, and the administration has repeatedly said it followed the guidance of lawyers at every step.
As far as questions of management, even critics acknowledge that some of the thorniest issues confronting the administration are longstanding ones.
Homelessness climbed by 69 percent during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 12 years in office, according to the Coalition for Homeless Services.
And while he acknowledges mistakes with Sandy repairs under the current administration, Staten Island Borough President James Oddo says many of the problems in approach originated under Bloomberg.
Oddo, whose borough was hard hit by the 2012 storm, applauded de Blasio’s efforts on Sandy despite missing his self-imposed deadline for repair completion.
“No we didn’t meet the deadline, no I’m not happy about that, but whatever progress we’ve made — and I think it is substantial in the last calendar year — I question whether we would have without that [sword of] Damocles hanging over people’s heads,” Oddo told The Post.
City officials have pointed to a major and rapid expansion of universal pre-K to all 4-year-olds as proof of a well-run bureaucracy, as well as significant progress toward de Blasio’s goal of creating or preserving 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next 10 years.
“Citywide pre-K for all, record low crime, and record highs in jobs, affordable housing creation and the graduation rate don’t happen by accident,” said City Hall spokesman Eric Phillips. “They’re the result of Mayor de Blasio’s effective, progressive management of city government.”