Mayor Zohran Mamdani says the city government’s top lawyer is personally looking into allegations revealed by The City Reporter that top officials at the agency overseeing city purchasing and properties regularly used personal emails and texting to discuss official business.
City employees are required to communicate about official business through official channels to ensure the discussions are preserved for public disclosure.
But Michelle Gundy, a whistleblower at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, alleged in a lawsuit and in discussions with The City Reporter that over the last year her supervisors routinely kept discussions about sensitive topics including nepotism and an unusual lease request off the grid by using their personal email, text messages and even hand-delivered documents. Gundy alleges she was fired after raising questions about this practice and other issues at the agency.
Asked about this on Wednesday, the mayor told The City Reporter: “This is an area where the corporation counsel is himself taking a direct look at it and when it comes to any indication of a departure from city practice from full compliance with the law, it’s something that we take incredibly seriously…”
Are you a city employee? Do you know of city workers using private email and text messages to discuss city business? Contact reporter Greg B. Smith on Signal at 646-208-1190 or at gsmith@thecityreporter.nyc.
The City Reporter
“And that is the case both for the importance of following the law but also, as you said, for the importance of making sure there are city records,” he added.
On Oct. 8, Corporation Counsel Steven Banks sent a letter to DCAS advising the department to inform staff not to delete any of the texts and emails where city business was discussed. Officials said the letter was a pro-forma notice the Law Department sends out in response to lawsuits; this particular notice was made months after the suit was filed and a week after The City Reporter sent a list of questions to DCAS over Gundy’s allegations.
Late Thursday DCAS spokesperson Anessa Hodgson said, “As is standard practice with legal action and in compliance with instructions from the City Law Department, we issued instructions and required next steps to relevant employees to ensure they are preserving records.”
Last weekend, in response to the corporation counsel’s missive, the DCAS general counsel sent an email to staff members named in the lawsuit and in The City Reporter’s Oct. 14 story instructing them to preserve personal texts and emails.
Gundy alleges she was fired in May in retaliation for raising questions about issues including an order instructing her to communicate about certain topics via her personal phone and email. In one case, Gundy said, a top official told her to put together a written memo about a nepotistic hire and hand deliver it directly instead of via her work phone or email.
Other off-line topics included discussion of how a probation commissioner during the Eric Adams administration had pushed DCAS to move her Manhattan-based agency to a building in Long Island City because it was near her home, and communications about fixing a flaw in the agency’s protocol for testing cooling towers for the potentially deadly Legionella bacteria.
The revelations about DCAS follow prior reports about a top aide to Mamdani coordinating City Hall messaging with so-called “influencers” via the encrypted app Signal. In at least one case, communications were set to auto-delete, meaning they couldn’t be retained as legally required.
Mamdani’s general counsel said he immediately instructed staff not to use Signal to discuss city business, and the mayor’s chief of staff sent out a notice reminding employees to use city phones and city emails when discussing official business.
The Department of Investigation, the city’s independent anti-corruption watchdog, has said it is aware of the allegations of off-site communications. On Thursday Diane Struzzi, a spokesperson for the agency, declined to comment on the “do-not-delete” instructions sent to DCAS staff.
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
The post Mamdani’s Top Lawyer to Probe Agency’s Off-Grid Chats appeared first on The City Reporter.
