A New York City plan to give migrants prepaid debit cards is prompting calls for an investigation of Mayor Adams under the suspicion that he failed to secure the best deal for the city. 

The city has entered a $53 million contract with the banking platform, Mobility Capital Finance, to provide migrants with the means to buy their own food, baby products, and other necessities at supermarkets, grocery stores, and convenience stores.

Each card can have at most $10,000 but will be reloaded every four weeks, according to the contract. 500 families staying in short term hotels, like the Roosevelt in midtown Manhattan, will be enrolled in the program. A family of four can receive $1,000, or $35 a day, for food. 

Mr. Adams says the pilot program could potentially save the city millions of dollars as the worsening crisis at the nation’s southern border increasingly weighs on the city’s budget. The plethora of fees for the services in question, however, appears to paint a different picture for taxpayers.

Rolling out the debit cards requires a $125,000 one-time setup fee and $250,000 in annual management fees. For the first $50 million dispersed through the program, the city will have to pay a 3 percent fee to Mobility Capital. 

The funds “would be for diapers and baby products and food,” New York City councilwoman Gale Brewer told CBS News on Monday, “but, you know, you have to be careful that that’s what it’s actually going to be for.” She says she wants to investigate why Mr. Adams pushed forward with the $53 million contract before seeing if the city could secure a better deal elsewhere.

Mr. Adams said the plan would save taxpayer money and prevent food waste, given that much of the food given to migrants at shelters gets tossed out. An employee at a Manhattan hotel housing migrants, Felipe Rodriguez, shared with the New York Post last month photographs of garbage bags full of uneaten sandwiches. Mr. Adams told reporters that his plan “is going to save us in the area of 7.2 million dollars a year,” or $600,000 a month.

“I know I’m disrupting what people would traditionally like for us to do,” Mr. Adams said. He commended Mobility Capital Finance for being a minority-owned business, a sector which he says has “historically been locked out.” He said he did not have a personal relationship with the company’s owner, explaining, “we don’t hang out in the Hamptons together or go to baseball games together.”