When Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently announced he was reappointing Adams administration holdover Michael Garner as the city’s top official promoting diversity in city contracts, he singled out Garner’s past success aiding minority- and women-run businesses in a similar role he had held for years at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).
But Garner’s record of MWBE success came under a cloud before Adams even appointed him.
In a report issued just as Garner left the agency to go work for City Hall, the MTA’s inspector general concluded that a unit he supervised cherry-picked and relied on unverified data that presented a distorted picture of the small-business development program Garner ran to steer minority-and women-owned firms to lucrative MTA contracts…