They’re bagging big bucks in Staten Island – and some deer, too.
The wildlife ecologist running Mayor de Blasio’s deer-vasectomy project raked in more than $603,000 in the first two years of the budget-busting program.
Dr. Anthony DeNicola, founder of the nonprofit White Buffalo Inc., was paid up to $2,500 a day for 250 days of project management and field sterilization work during the 2016/17 and 2017/18 seasons, according to city budget documents reviewed by The Post.
DeNicola’s wife Vickie was a staff member during the project’s first season, shooting bucks with tranquilizer guns and wrangling the dazed animals, the Staten Island Advance reported. That role paid $1,600 a day for 150 days of work – a total of $240,000 for a job that typically pays just $29,968 a year, according to Ziprecruiter.com.
Together, the DeNicolas’ bloated salaries gobbled up to 29 percent of the project’s first-year expenses.
The company flew in veterinarian Dr. Steve Timm from Wisconsin for a 15-day stint in 2016 to train other vets to do the vasectomy procedure at a cost of $26,250, paying him $1,750 a day. That’s about four times the going rate for a wildlife veterinarian, according to Glassdoor.com.
Since then, the project’s vets have been earning between $1,050 and $1,700 daily.
So far the city has given 1,456 randy bucks the snip at a cost of $2,652.95 per animal under the terms of White Buffalo’s no-bid emergency contract.
A second round of budget increases in July brought the total cost of the three-year program to $4.1 million, up from its original budget of $3.3 million — because the contractor found more deer roaming the borough than he’d expected.
DeNicola estimated the herd size at 1,884 last spring, which the Parks Department touted as an 8 percent drop from the previous year.
“We expect the population will continue to decrease once we complete our third year and reach our ultimate goal of sterilizing 98 percent of bucks,” said department spokeswoman Meghan Lalor.
But naturalist Kip Adams of Quality Deer Management Association cast doubt on that number.
“If there are 1,400 males there to be sterilized, there are definitely more than 1,800 deer altogether,” Adams said. “You’ll always have at least as many females as males, and most likely more.”
And Staten Islanders insist they’re spotting more deer than ever.
“They are taking over,” said Jami Weber, who counted 14 of them during a 10-minute drive in the borough’s south shore in mid-December – including several bucks lacking the telltale ear tags that prove it’s shooting blanks.
The city’s project is the first-ever attempt to rein in growing herds of white-tailed deer by sterilizing only males. Details of its costs were first reported by the Advance.
Out-of-control deer populations cause deadly traffic accidents, spread tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease, and eat forest ecosystems down to the ground.
This year, deer caused 69 car crashes in Staten Island through Nov. 3, according to the NYPD. That’s on track to match the 99 deer-involved collisions in 2017 — and a steep increase from the 31 accidents blamed on deer in 2015.
Meanwhile, other states have begun to outlaw deer sterilization entirely, condemning the procedure as inhumane.
Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan signed a bill Dec. 19 to outlaw a White Buffalo doe-sterilization project in Ann Arbor.
“It’s a cruel way to deal with animals because of the stress of the tranquilization process,” bill sponsor Rep. Triston Cole told the Detroit Free Press.