The report from New York’s Inspector General critiques former RIOC CEO Shelton J. Haynes for ethical violations while suggesting broader systemic corruption within New York State governance.
A lesson learned from the New York State Inspector General’s report, Investigating the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, is how very easy it is to kick someone when they’re down. Timing and elevated finger-pointing is everything.
by David Stone, The Roosevelt Island Daily’s European Bureau Chief
The Gist of the Argument
In I.G. Lucy Lang’s view, former RIOC CEO Shelton J. Haynes and a small handful of associates sullied the ethical platform on which New York proudly sits. Thats’s where the first “Oh, really…?” falls in with a jaw drop. Is there anyone living on this planet longer than a housefly who believes that ethics is a flag flown proudly in New York State?
We’d like to introduce newcomers and innocents to Andrew Cuomo, Joseph Percoco and Brian Benjamin, Governor Kathy Hochul’s handpicked sidekick as Lieutenant Governor. And that’s just the froth at the top of a heady brew of corruption.
Lang concludes that Haynes hired a public reputation consultant firm with a primary goal of burnishing his standing after suffering a thorny onslaught of bad press. (Full Disclosure: I’m fingered as Haynes’s blasting blogger of record against him in Lang’s report.) Former Communications VP Akeem Jamal also gets a lashing because managing the firm was his responsibility.
The contract and its intent was unethical, Lang says, because public money was used for personal gain, not for any bonafide public purpose.
Lang also goes after former Chief Counsel Gretchen Robinson and Human Resources manager Tajuna Sharpe. That leaves readers scratching their heads because no evidence is presented against either. Personal loyalty is not a crime, the last time I looked.
No one here claims that Haynes and the others were faultless. Even RIOC’s spineless board woke up briefly and rummaged up a crowd of current and form employees who accused him, with Robinson’s consent, of establishing a hostile workplace. But, longtime RIOC watchers claim convincingly that he inherited one. And how does $175K blunder stack up against millions wasted on excess staffing with bloated salaries for years? Not to mention the overflowing incompetence?
Were Haynes and Company Set Up?
Consider this. Lang’s report came after a complaint filed by the Division of Housing and Community Renewal. HCR oversees RIOC. Commissioner RuthAnne Visnauskas is board chair. So, essentially, HCR turned over to Lang the results of its own piss poor oversight, asking her to identify the villains. Oddly, Lang zoomed past, under and around Visnauskas and her board of cephalopods and landed on Haynes.
She was agile and superficially elegant about it. It’s right there in her high-toned report. Haynes is the bad guy, and she could not find a single smudge of blame on Visnauskas or her board which supervised the man for five years.
The fact is, though, that Visnauskas and her board knew about this all along, or as much as they wanted to, and condoned it with silence. The Daily, in its due diligence, repeatedly reported on the ludicrous products emerging from the deal. Articles aimed at service engine optimization (SEO – i.e., improving results from search engines) were so poorly written you could imagine someone was trying to undermine, not uplift Haynes and Jamal.
Jamal, an alleged public relations specialist dispatched to Roosevelt Island by Governor Hochul, should have been fired by Haynes before it was too late. They were so not on the same page, there wasn’t even a page. And you wonder if Jamal even looked at the bizarre posts he let slide through.
RIOC was so over its head in fighting for reputation improvement that it missed a core error: Improved SEO is virtually useless when it comes to daily news. Its contractor boasted about how its efforts drove down search results for Daily articles critical of Haynes over a period of months. But that happens naturally because current events are… well, current. Nobody cares much about old newsworthy events because a tidal wave of following current events shove their significance downhill.
So, Why Attack Haynes?
In perspective, at least a half-dozen I.G. complaints were filed against Haynes and company along with a stack of lawsuits. Lucy Lang ignored every other one of them, except one where her staff rejected the complaint, not on the merits, but because it should have been filed with another state agency.
If none of those got a fire started, why this one? Others were far more concerning. For examples, spending and accounting for the Swift Emergency Medical COVID testing site and some suspicious deals cut with Hudson Related. That’s not to imply that any wrongdoing happened in either case, but Lang apparently sent them to the circular file near her desk, never to be seen or heard from again.
The most likely spark that lit the high-toned report was the heat raised over Haynes’s fighting back. The administration wanted to cut its losses. Sooner or later, someone was bound to ask why Visnauskas, a Hochul proxy, and her board let the ethical violations go on for so long.
Had Haynes took a golden parachute and walked away in silence, this report would most likely never have seen the light of day. After all, having ignored numerous prior complaints, Lang’s office could have muffled its response as a routine matter.
In the end, it seems that nothing Haynes did was far out of line for New York State, a chronically corrupt and ethically out of control operation. He has never been accused of corruption by anyone, but public relations decisions left him without viable public voices speaking on his behalf. Had he effectively worked with the media, real achievements, like the COVID testing site and improvements at the Youth Center, may have overshadowed his faults. After all, each of us has them as well as virtues.
And it should not be forgotten that Haynes made great hires. Gerrald Ellis, who Visnauskas should have bent over backward to retain, Dhruvika Patel Amin, a smooth and transparent steward of RIOC finances, and Swiss Army Knife Bryant Daniels, who is underpaid for all he does inside the corporation – all were hired by Shelton J. Haynes.
Maybe Haynes just objected too loudly while still in his chair on the second floor of Blackwell House.
AVAC Is Working. The Model Is What’s Aging.
Roosevelt Island’s AVAC system is often discussed as if it were either a miracle or a menace. In truth, it is neither. It is functioning infrastructure that has reached a point in its lifecycle where how it is maintained matters as much as whether it exists at all.
