The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board is tweaking some of its reporting requirements in an effort to get a better understanding of which public servants have “substantial” influence over policy, with discrepancies across agencies, the board said.
Currently, every city agency is required annually to submit employee names to its “substantial policy discretion” list, which is collected by COIB.
The list includes municipal managers, lawyers, deputy mayors, top aides, and anyone else at the agency or department who “has major responsibilities and exercises independent judgment in connection with determining important agency matters.”
Once on the list, those people are barred from fundraising for anyone running for citywide office, City Council or borough president. They are also restricted from holding any political party position, such as an assembly district leader or a national or state committee member.
(This rule was why Brooklyn Democratic party official Edu Hermelyn resigned from his job in the Adams administration in 2022, following an investigation by THE CITY.)
Under the proposed changes released last week for public comment, COIB suggests making agencies file names twice a year — and to formally put in writing a current practice that allows the Board to notify people who have additional restrictions because of their inclusion on the list, instead of the agency they work for
The aim of the decades-old list is to tamp down political corruption and prevent civil servants from being swayed by partisan concerns. It was enacted in 1990 as a result of the Parking Violations Bureau scandal from 1986 that ended multiple political careers, according to earlier reporting.
The Big Three
Although the proposal came days after THE CITY’s story on mayoral aide Winnie Greco being recently added to the list, the changes were first floated at a board meeting in August. There, COIB staff discussed the difficulty in getting a clear sense of who is making policy, particularly at three large city agencies: the NYPD, the Health and Hospitals Corporation, and the Department of Education.
COIB staffers believed the large agencies could be under-representing who had influence over policy compared to smaller agencies, which often had longer policy-discretion lists.
“These three agencies in particular seem to have an issue of under-designating public servants especially in comparison to let’s say medium-sized city agencies,” Ethan Carrier, COIB’s general counsel, said at the August meeting.
For example, he noted that the NYPD is 10 times the size of the Department of Transportation but has “about the same” number of people on its policy list. And the Health and Hospitals Corporation is five times larger than the New York City Housing Authority, but actually submitted fewer people.
A spokesperson for the DOE said in a statement they “follow the rules laid out by the COIB.” Representatives for the two other agencies did not respond to emails from THE CITY seeking comment on the list.
Fernando Bohorquez Jr., a member of the board since 2014, noted during the January board meeting that “there are agencies that are overinclusive, there are agencies that are under-inclusive.”
While the large agencies like NYPD and DOE had way less than 1% of its staff included, the Department of Cultural Affairs had 20% of its staff listed as substantial policy makers.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Mayor’s List Grew
The “substantial policy discretion” rule was first adopted at the beginning of former Mayor David Dinkins’ administration, and amended three times since then, most recently in 2019.
The current list is 3,042 city employees (about 1% of the municipal workforce), and the list has grown; the list was around 2,480 people in 2021, the last year of Bill de Blasio’s second term. The mayor’s office doubled the number of included staffers between 2022 and 2023.
That includes the addition of Greco, who was publicly added to the list just days before her homes were raided by the FBI and months after the Department of Investigation opened a probe following reporting by THE CITY.
Greco is still on “medical leave” after having a health episode during the FBI raid on Feb. 29, according to the mayor’s press office.
Earlier this month, a spokesperson for the mayor noted that Greco advised the administration on issues affecting the city’s Asian-American communities and called the discretion list broad and defined by COIB. They did not explain why she was only added two years into her tenure in the Adams administration.
Members of the public have until April 17 to submit public comments on the proposed rules online. A hearing to vote on the change will be held that day at Spector Hall, 22 Reade Street in Manhattan from 4 to 4:30 p.m.