Mayor Adams puts taxpayers on the hook for $1.6 billion a year on migrants — maybe through 2029!

Mayor Adams’ prospects of winning a second term (or even finishing the first) are increasingly uncertain. But he’s trying to ensure that one big feature of his mayoralty stays in office, even if he doesn’t: billions of dollars in taxpayer money to put migrants up in hotels.

Gov. Hochul should step in to nix his latest contract bid, which could have border-crossers in hotel rooms until 2029.

Adams wanted this to be a good news week, migrant-wise. City Hall announced Wednesday that it will close the 3,000-capacity Randalls Island tent shelter, scene of two murders, by February.

He bragged that his policy of getting single adult migrants who stay there to move on after 30 or 60 days has been effective.

Plus, with the Biden administration belatedly tightening the border, the number of newcomers has shrunk for nearly four months.

Why, then, behind the scenes, is the Adams administration talking up the migrant “emergency” to sign yet another long-term contract for hotel shelter?

As the Post’s Carl Campanile reports, the city’s homeless-services department will soon sign a new contract to extend the use of 14,000 city hotel rooms as “sanctuary sites.”

The new contract would run until at least June 2026 — and would have a three-year renewal option after that, bringing us to June 2029.

The cost: $661 million annually, or $130 a hotel room.

And the contract doesn’t include all sorts of ancillary costs that generally go with these rooms: $176 a day in security, food, “case management,” legal-advice, and other “overhead” costs, as estimated by the city comptroller.

Even with a little projected savings from the current room-only rate of $156 a night, the city is still likely spend close to $1.6 billion a year on these contracts, indefinitely.

Not to mention the other costs to the city.

Taking more than 100 hotels (and possibly 200) off of the tourist and business-traveler market for years on end hobbles the city’s slow recovery from COVID-19 lockdowns.

And despite the city’s see-no-evil stance when it comes to migrant crime, there’s a reason these hotels need massive security presences. Security that’s often ineffective: migrant hotels plague nearby neighbors with loud music, speeding mopeds, and drug use that spills off the property.

But even assuming this contract is a good idea, this isn’t the way to go about it. The city could ask hotels to bid against each other on costs and services, including, possibly, providing food and security for cheaper than outside contractors do.

Instead, the city will contract for one big vendor (possibly the Hotel Association of NYC, which is doing similar work already, and which has donated $2,100 to Adams’s reelection campaign) to “locate hotels, negotiate rates, [and] enter into commercial hotel agreements.”

The hotel association may be honest, but this type of singe-vendor deal offers massive scope for irregularity. What would motivate the new hotel-contract manager, whether HANYC or another winner, to pick one particular hotel over another?

For budget hotels, 100% occupancy for years on end is a plum deal.

And the contract favors unionization, further pushing up costs. Each hotel must “obtain a labor peace agreement” with its workforce that includes collective bargaining.

Another big problem: this proposed new contract conflicts with the mayor’s own budget projections.

The city budget projects that “asylum seeking” spending will fall from $4.7 billion this year to $4 billion next, then to $3 billion, and then to zero by summer 2027.

How can the city square this projection of a migrant crisis that’s fully “solved” in less than three years, with its similar projection that it may need to extend this new migrant-hotel contract until 2029?

In the two weeks since the mayor’s federal indictment, Gov. Hochul has made clear she expects big changes at City Hall. She’s pushing out the mayor’s band of loyalists and pushing in caretaker deputies and commissioners, potentially to get the city through to next summer’s scheduled mayoral primary without a new scandal.

But the mayor clearly thinks that when it comes to awarding migrant contracts — partly what the feds and others are investigating his former top staff for! — it’s business as usual.

As Adams said upon his indictment, his “day to day will not change.”

It should — and the governor should make it clear that it’s not just the people who need to go, but the policies.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.