City officials auctioned off nearly $225 million worth of surplus COVID-19
medical equipment and safety gear for just $500,000 — or a paltry 0.2 cents on the dollar, according to a stunning report Tuesday.
The bargain-basement sales included nearly 3,000 mechanical ventilators that cost taxpayers $12 million but were unloaded as “non-functioning medical equipment for scrap metal” at a rock-bottom price of just $24,600 on Jan. 24,
according to nonprofit news website The City.
It reportedly took 28 truckloads for a Long Island junk dealer to haul off the
once-scarce devices, which former Mayor Bill de Blasio had predicted would help the Big Apple “beat this crisis and prepare for the next.”
“This is a story about doing the impossible,” de Blasio
bragged on April 21, 2020. “We’d never made a ventilator before — and so we made thousands. We learned it would take a year — and so we did it in a month.”
De Blasio’s administration also overpaid for items that included 50,000 face shields at $6.70 each, compared to an average price at the start of the pandemic of $3.67, The City said, citing information from city Comptroller Brad Lander.
They’re now part of a massive lot of 701,000 face shields that were reportedly put up for auction last week with an opening bid of just $1,000, or 0.14 cents each.
The City blamed the epic markdowns on de Blasio’s decision to waive any oversight of his panic purchases, preventing then-Comptroller Scott Stringer from scrutinizing the emergency contracts.
One contract, for $9.1 million, reportedly went to controversial, New Jersey-based Digital Gadgets for ventilators that the company failed to deliver, then provided the city with N95 masks instead.
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