New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin accused the Department of Education Thursday of a “troubling pattern of opacity, slow-walking, and delay” related to a controversy over hundreds of no-bid school contracts.
The allegation marked a breaking point after months of tensions between the Council and Chancellor Kamar Samuels about greater oversight of the agreements. The criticism comes as Samuels himself is facing an investigation for a no-bid contract he signed as a Manhattan school district superintendent before being appointed chancellor.
Menin made her allegation in a follow-up letter to Samuels on a request for the DOE to share 352 contracts that were not competitively bid, plus another 227 agreements for “mandated services.” All in, DOE — the largest share of the city’s budget — spends $12.9 billion on contracts each year, according to the memo.
The Council has been asking for full contracts for months. The Mamdani administration says their production would require manpower it does not have to go through millions of pages.
Menin did not mention the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation’s probe of Samuels in her missive — but raised broader concerns about no-bid procurement across the city’s school system.
“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 — both matters of significant public interest given the volume and cost of the contracts at issue,” the speaker wrote.
Menin and Councilman Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx), chair of the education committee, started asking about the contracts at Council hearings and in internal communications last spring, according to Menin’s letter. The DOE provided summaries of the first 60 contracts — including the vendors, costs, and goods and services — but not the full agreements.
Last month, DOE and senior Council staff had a closed-door meeting to discuss the issue. Menin said the DOE defended the delay, citing staffing challenges and a need to give vendors “the opportunity to redact sensitive information.”
The same day, DOE provided what the Mamdani administration says was the rest of the two-to-three-page summaries, but the Council kept pushing for full copies.
“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,” wrote Menin, who suggested the process should take “no more than a few hours of work.”
The mayor’s spokesperson strongly disputed the speaker’s estimate, saying it would take “thousands of hours” of work that would be “better spent delivering for students.”
Menin’s first request for contracts in March came before allegations against Samuels were made public, though the controversy has drawn attention to the school system’s broken contracting process.
Samuels, then a local superintendent, has been accused of bill-splitting in School District 3 to cut through bureaucracy and avoid the competitive bidding process required for contracts above a certain threshold.
Samuels has said that his actions on the Upper West Side and in Harlem were taken on behalf of the students in his care and not for any personal gain. Mayor Mamdani has stood by his schools chancellor.