QUEENS — Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill Thursday to reform the Queens Library, whose president has come under fire in recent months for his high salary and lavish spending.
According to published reports, Thomas Galante, the library's president and CEO, earns $390,000. He also reportedly spent $140,000 last year to renovate his library office in Jamaica and came under scrutiny for holding another job as a consultant, making $115,000 for the work, according to the Daily News.
In April, the library's board of trustees voted to keep Galante, even though Queens Borough President Melinda Katz asked him to take a leave of absence.
The new bill requires financial disclosure from key executives at the Queens Library and limits their ability to work for other employers to prevent potential conflicts of interest.
It also calls for the creation of an audit committee to oversee the library’s accounting and financial reporting processes.
“With this reform law in place, we can now go about the business of ensuring that the Queens Library is governed with transparency and proper oversight and acts as a proper steward of the taxpayer dollars it receives,” said Katz, who helped draft the bill, in a statement.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Michael Gianaris and Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry, was signed the day after the Daily News reported that the library's trustees had have scheduled a meeting for Thursday night to renegotiate Galante's contract.
The proposal, according to the News, called for removing Galante as director and giving him a consulting job instead, that would pay $800,000 over a two-year-period.
The meeting, which Katz said was scheduled “amidst 3 different investigations and several grand jury subpoenas,“ had eventually been canceled.
“I am getting tired of calling the behavior of this Board 'an outrage,'" Katz said in a statement.
She also said that she “will have to remove Trustees who are not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities,” which, she said, the new bill made easier to do.
