Mayor Adams’ administration is shelling out an average of nearly $5 million per day on housing and feeding migrants amid an ongoing surge in asylum seekers arriving from the U.S. southern border, according to a Daily News analysis.
Zach Iscol, Adams’ emergency management commissioner, said at a City Council hearing Friday that the administration is on average spending $363 per day on room and board for every person in its care. But later, Adams spokeswoman Kate Smart said the rate is a dollar higher — and that it applies to every asylum-seeking household in the city’s care, not to every individual.
In total, there are currently about 12,700 migrant households in the city’s shelters and Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, commonly known as HERRCs, according to Adams’ office.
Based on the $364 daily rate, that means the city is on average spending $4.62 million every day on housing and food for those 12,700 households.
“This is not sustainable,” Iscol said of the city’s ballooning migrant crisis tab, which now tops $500 million.
The city has largely shouldered the financial burden of the migrant crisis alone since thousands of mostly Latin American asylum seekers started arriving last spring, many of them fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries. The federal government has thus far only forked over about $8 million in migrant-related aid to the city, according to Adams’ administration.
Roughly 8,000 migrant individuals are housed in the city’s eight HERRCs, according to Iscol. Another 22,000 migrants are in the shelter system.
Seven of the HERRCs are running out of hotels, and the eighth one is in a Brooklyn Cruise Terminal warehouse on the Red Hook waterfront.
According to Iscol, the administration had spent $141 million on the HERRCs alone as of the end of January. First Deputy Homeless Services Commissioner Molly Park, who was also at the hearing, said her agency had spent $313 million as of the same time frame on accommodating migrants.
The Adams officials at Friday’s hearing said the city needs a lot more help from the feds and Gov. Hochul, noting that the administration estimates it could spend as much as $1.4 billion on the migrant crisis this fiscal year alone. Hochul has deployed National Guard troops to help with migrant response logistics, and provided some legal resources for asylum seekers.
Queens Councilwoman Julie Won, a Democrat who chairs the contracts committee, agreed the city needs more assistance — especially from Hochul.
“She can’t just be our governor when it’s convenient,” she told Iscol. “I agree with you that our state partners and our federal partners need to step up.”
Another cost issue that came up in the hearing was how much the city is spending on food for migrants.
Dr. Ted Long, a top official at the city’s public hospital system, which helps operate the HERRCs, said the average daily cost for feeding migrants in the HERRCs is $17 per person. That’s significantly more than what the city spends on food for people in homeless shelters. Park said some shelters only dish out $6 on food per person daily.
Iscol cautioned Council members against reading too much into the food cost discrepancy.
“Emergencies are going to cost more. There’s a lot of infrastructure that we need to put in place,” he said.
Adams has repeatedly said the city’s at a “breaking point” due to the migrant crisis and warned he may be forced to cut basic services if the feds don’t pick up a large chunk of the growing bill.
However, Manhattan Councilwoman Gale Brewer raised concern in the hearing about what the administration is doing to secure funds from the feds.
She told Iscol she had been informed the administration has not submitted all its receipts for migrant-related costs with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for reimbursement.
Iscol replied that the administration has filed receipts that exceed the $8 million it has received so far from FEMA, but would not specify a dollar figure for its total submission.
Brewer, who used to handle federal reimbursement applications on the city’s behalf while working in Mayor David Dinkins’ administration, told The News after the hearing that she doesn’t understand why Adams’ team can’t furnish the Council with a total dollar figure for proposed reimbursements.
“How is the public supposed to know that you have such a need if you can’t show the receipts?” Brewer said. “They should be submitting as much as they can. I hope they’re doing that, but I don’t know because they haven’t said.”
The figures in this story have been updated. A previous version published online, based on numbers supplied during a City Council meeting, reported that the city spends an average of $10 million per day on housing and feeding migrants.
