BATTERY PARK CITY — A former Battery Park City Authority executive was fired after he exposed a corrupt process for approving contracts, and decried the treatment of an employee who was being sexually harassed by BPCA's acting president and other leadership, a federal lawsuit claims.
Kirk Swanson, an ex-vice president of administration for the state agency was fired last year in retaliation for denouncing the BPCA's wrongdoings, he claims in a suit filed in Manhattan federal court earlier this month.
According to the suit, first reported by the New York Post, Swanson, who worked at the BPCA for two years, repeatedly complained about the treatment of an employee who worked under him.
The woman had filed a complaint with the Governor's Office of Employee Relations in 2014, claiming she was being sexually harassed by Robert Serpico, the BPCA's acting president at the time, and current CFO, as well as Brenda McIntyre, the vice president of human resources, the suit said.
Swanson says in the suit that despite his conversations about Serpico's "long history of sexually inappropriate behavior" and confronting McIntyre about her conduct, the only action taken by BPCA officials was to ensure that McIntyre no longer reported to him.
The suit also claims the BPCA awarded two contracts without going through the proper bid process.
Swanson alleges that in March 2014, BPCA president Shari Hyman pushed for her preferred vendor to redesign the BPCA's and the Battery Park Conservancy's websites, instead of going through a proper Request for Proposals process.
To bypass normal bid procedures, BPCA officials "misleadingly" split the contract for the websites into two parts, one for the BPCA, and one for the Conservancy. The award for each of those contracts would be less than $50,000, thus making them "discretionary procurements" that wouldn't need to go up against three competitive bids.
Swanson said he complained that the process was "utterly bogus" and then found out about other "senior staff fraudulently awarding a contract," the suit says.
He claims that he learned that agency officials had pushed through a contract for legal work with firm Liddle & Robinson, also without going through appropriate approvals, he said.
Three days after outlining his complaints about the Liddle contract in an email to the acting general counsel, in April 2014, Swanson was fired, the suit says.
One of the reasons given to Swanson by the BPCA president for his termination was that email to the general counsel, he claims.
His lawyer, Jason Solotaroff, said his client was let go for just doing what he was supposed to do.
“Mr. Swanson simply did his job and should not have been fired it,” Solotaroff said.
A spokesman for the BPCA said the complaint is "nothing more than baseless allegations."
