City Comptroller Scott Stringer says he has been wrongly iced out of his mandated oversight role by Mayor de Blasio’s new plan for living-wage benefits — and is calling on the City Council to fix it.
Stringer claimed the unilateral move — which the mayor enacted by executive order Tuesday — took away the comptroller’s power to investigate violations of the new $ 13.13 hourly rate for workers at city-subsidized developments.
Instead, he charged, those duties have been handed to the mayor-controlled Department of Consumer Affairs.
“For the first time in history, the Comptroller’s Office has been stripped of investigatory powers over living-wage laws. This is a step in the wrong direction for our city,” Stringer told The Post.
He said he supports the expansion of the law — which officials said would boost the number of workers covered from 1,200 to roughly 18,000 over the next five years. But Stringer said restoring independent oversight was a must.
“Placing accountability in a mayoral agency with little to no experience in wage enforcement weakens the promise of this essential worker protection,” the comptroller said.
But city officials scoffed at Stringer’s reading of the order, saying DCA’s role was simply administrative, one that had been called for in the original law passed in 2012.
They noted that the executive order specifically preserves the comptroller’s “responsibility for monitoring compliance with and conducting investigations” under the law.
“The order makes absolutely clear the comptroller’s authority is in no way affected,” said City Hall spokesman Wiley Norvell. “It’s regrettable that without fully assessing the facts, the comptroller would try to obstruct the city’s efforts to reach more New Yorkers with a living wage.”
Officials at the Comptroller’s Office insisted that the executive order obstructs their ability to probe violations of the newly hiked hourly rates.
And that office wasn’t the only one complaining Tuesday.
Some council members said the executive order bypassed the typical pathway for legislation to be vetted and voted on by the council — including at public hearings.
“I think it’s an unnecessary use of the executive order in a city which has a legislature for a reason — and one which shares the mayor’s views on this matter,” said minority leader Vincent Ignizio (R-SI). “So it seems like the Mayor’s Office is interested in going it alone just to say they went it alone.”
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