Under the terms of the contract, the federally regulated New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has paid federal supervisor Bart Schwartz nearly $600 an hour, worth $12 million this year alone.
Schwartz's security company Guidepost Solutions signed a 13-page contract with city hall, and the pay sheet showed Schwartz charged $594 an hour for working, according to the New York Post.
Schwartz's annual revenue cap is $350,000, but only in the first year of the agreement, the documents show.
Under the agreement, Schwartz's executives are paid $503 an hour, and investigators are paid up to $366 an hour.
Even administrative clerks earn $68 to $137 an hour.
The terms of the contract also allow Schwartz to create additional positions for up to $650 an hour based on guidepost solutions' experience.
In addition, the contract makes it clear that salary levels for the coming years will depend on the amount of work done, which means it could exceed $12 million this year.
In February, the federal government hired Schwartz to oversee the troubled New York City Housing Agency, the city's largest landlord, providing housing to more than 400,000 New Yorkers.
And a month before Schwartz took office, City Hall struck a deal with the Us Department of Housing and Urban Development to settle a heavy lawsuit filed by manhattan's attorney's office.
The infringement lawsuit, filed in June 2018, alleges years of new York City Housing Department officials lying about mandatory lead checks in apartments and systematically covering up deteriorating living conditions in public housing.
In January, City Hall also struck a deal with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to require the Blanche administration to inject $2.2 billion into government buildings, terms equivalent to the federal government's partial takeover of the New York City Housing Department, such as installing monitors.
Since February, Schwartz has exercised its oversight powers by issuing two committed quarterly reports exposing problems and mismanagement with the New York City Housing Authority.
Ironically, however, schwartz's oversight agency has not disclosed the size of its budget or made the contract public for months.
City Hall has also repeatedly rejected requests from the media under the Freedom of Information Law and referred the issues to federal authorities who refused to respond.
Mailings received later by the nonprofit news site The City showed that city hall lawyers were barred from participating in discussions between Schwartz, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Manhattan Attorney's Office over the guidepost's budget, even though taxpayers were legally required to pay the bills incurred.
A Schwartz spokesman said operating fees had been discounted and that several members of the regulatory team were on the minimum hourly wage stipulated in the contract.
Schwartz was a former federal prosecutor who worked with rudy giuliani, then manhattan's attorney, in the 1980s as head of the criminal prosecution division.
But Schwartz is a newcomer to public housing, overseeing the nation's largest public housing agency, and the New York City Housing Authority is facing serious challenges.
Records show that the New York City Housing Authority will need $38 billion in repair costs over the next decade, and last December City Hall announced that the public housing transformation program NYCHA 2.0 provides $24 billion in repair funds over the same period, but leaves a $14 billion funding gap.
At the same time, the Blancheau administration has struggled to move forward with a key part of the NYCHA 2.0 plan, which may be blamed on an increased funding gap.
Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokesman for the mayor's office, said that previous administrations ignored residents, and we made historic investments to work with the federal government to reverse the dilemma of the New York City Housing Authority. The Housing Authority's new leadership team will continue to work with regulators to improve the lives of the 400,000 New Yorkers living in public housing.
(Compiler: Wang Shuo)
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