Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Agency OK'd Illegal Deal for Juvenile Justice Program So Not to Upset Cuomo

 Administration for Children's Services Commissioner Gladys Carrion (right) poses outside a Close to Home facility in Crown Heights. ACS illegally paid a contractor to turn the building into a Close to Home facility, court records show.
Administration for Children's Services Commissioner Gladys Carrion (right) poses outside a Close to Home facility in Crown Heights. ACS illegally paid a contractor to turn the building into a Close to Home facility, court records show.
View Full Caption
Administration for Children's Services

CROWN HEIGHTS — Secret recordings show that the Administration for Children’s Services officials who approved an illegal deal to get a juvenile justice reform program up and running were under intense pressure to move quickly so as not to disappoint their agency head and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The recordings, part of a lawsuit against the city, include a March 4, 2015, conversation between ACS Deputy Commissioner Mitch Gipson and a contractor. Gipson explains how the illegal deal — involving renovating buildings to serve as detention centers for the Close to Home program — had been flagged and was affecting the agency’s tight deadline.

“Part of the challenge is that we still want to bring these online as soon as possible,” Gipson says in the recording. “That goes back to the original statement about the sensitivity to this matter, because it goes all the way to the governor’s house.”

The Close to Home program, which puts city juvenile offenders into ACS-supervised detention centers near their families, was conceived in 2012 by Cuomo and ACS Commissioner Gladys Carrion, who, at the time, was the head of the state Office of Children and Family Services.

Gipson says in the recording that any delays in the program would upset them both.

“It goes back to the governor having made this effort, and our commissioner, who was at the governor’s house when this started,” Gipson says. “So this is literally close — figuratively close — to home when it comes to our people, and so any delay in bringing those young people closer to home will be frowned upon and disappoint people, including the governor.”

Michael Gianatasio, the contractor with whom Gipson was speaking, filed a transcript of the recording last week as part of his ongoing lawsuit against the city and ACS in Manhattan Civil Supreme Court.

DNAinfo New York reported in February that ACS circumvented the city’s procurement rules and illegally inked a deal with Gianatasio’s firm, MRG Engineering & Construction, in December 2014.

A previous transcript of a recording of Gipson revealed that ACS broke procurement rules because it was given a very short time frame to get the facilities online.

Under the deal, ACS agreed to pay $6 million to renovate two Close to Home facilities, in Crown Heights and Norwood, by March 2015.

ACS had already given $4 million to MRG when the deal collapsed in February 2015, after the mayor’s office realized the contract wasn’t valid.

The latest transcript filing shows how Gipson and other ACS officials were frantically working with City Hall to salvage the project.

“Everybody’s involved all the way up to, but maybe not yet including, the mayor, although I can’t, I don’t know,” Gipson tells Gianatasio in the March 4 recording. “I know deputy mayors are involved in this.”

Gipson also said how the stalled project was making him and other ACS officials sweat.

“Every day that you lose is a day that we lose is a day that we have to face the music with the state of New York,” he said.

The city ultimately tried to salvage the project by trying to get MRG and Leake and Watts, the nonprofit picked to operate the Close to Home facilities, to sign a new valid contract with each other.

But negotiations collapsed, and MRG filed its lawsuit in May, claiming it was still owed $1.7 million for work.

DNAinfo has since learned that despite MRG completing the majority of work at the Crown Heights site, ACS picked another contractor to redo the facility, likely leading to millions of dollars in additional costs.

ACS hired the new contractor over the summer through a procurement process known as an emergency purchase, according to sources. The Crown Heights site, which was supposed to open during summer 2015, now won’t open until at least this summer, sources said.

ACS declined to comment because the lawsuit is still being litigated.

Gianatasio’s firm has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The firm’s lawyer, Michael Mauro, declined to comment.