He owes the public a good explanation. Could be just to avoid chatter in the office about his personal life, if the billing pattern used resulted in different people processing the expenses, instead of one person or group if the billings had all been routed to the main “mayor’s office” account. Not too clear what the meaning is of “units of the mayor’s office”. If these are just subsets of the mayor’s office, I’m not sure why they would each need separate budgets and maybe they didn’t. If they did each have separate budgets, did they get billed for a portion of expenses each time the mayor went on some public outing that was related to a given unit’s function, but also related to other things?
I don’t have a problem with public figures getting taxpayer-funded security details for personal activities. Someone like a mayor of NYC is very definitely a target, and it would get pretty hard to find people willing to take these positions if they had to spend a couple hundred thousand a year in extra security costs just to stay reasonably safe while doing whatever they would normally be doing in their personal time (other thatn the occasional billionaire who gets an urge to take a huge pay cut and put up with all the crap that public office entails). But pending some good explanation, this sounds like a deliberate attempt to conceal expenses, and that is definitely not okay for public figures to do with taxpayers’ money.
Well said. I don’t know what the law says about whether or not the mayor is supposed to reimburse the city for security on personal trips. However, the fact that he appears to have hidden tens of thousands of dollars in obscure parts of the budget is very suspicious. The fact that he cited “security” as an excuse to stonewall auditors’ questions is even worse.
Much like the ‘toons, the guy has a long pattern of behaving as if the law does not apply to him. I will not vote for a would-be king who believes he’s above the law.