De Blasio Scrutinized Over Donations From Businesses

During his campaign to become New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio held himself out as a champion of the average New Yorker who would diminish the clout of big business interests at City Hall.

But in recent weeks, his administration has become mired in a flurry of conflict-of-interest investigations that are threatening to taint his administration as one that revived pay-for-play politics.

Disclosure forms filed by the mayor’s nonprofit group, the Campaign For One New York, show that it accepted numerous contributions from companies that did business with the city or wanted something from his administration.

Investigators want to know if real estate developers and other donors received preferential treatment from the city in exchange for contributions to the group, which was created to promote the mayor’s policy agenda.

One donor, Joseph Dussich, ran a janitorial supply company that was trying to sell the city mint-scented trash bags to repel rats. He gave $100,000 to the Campaign for One New York, and was subsequently awarded a city contract.

Hudson Companies, a real estate firm, gave $5,000 before the city awarded it a bid to transform a Brooklyn library into a residential skyscraper.

A Las Vegas technology company, Frias Transportation Infrastructure, gave $25,000 while pitching software to city taxi regulators designed to monitor cabbies’ whereabouts in real time.

Also on the donor list was the powerful American Federation of Teachers, which gave a whopping $350,000 to the nonprofit in 2014, less than a month before the city penned a contract with its public school teachers giving them raises and retroactive pay. City Hall denied any link. Union president Randi Weingarten insisted the donation “was fulfilling a long-standing commitment” by the union to support universal pre-kindergarten, which was at the top of the Campaign for One New York’s priorities list.

De Blasio, a liberal Democrat, said nobody who donated to the nonprofit group ever got preferential treatment from the city.

“The bottom line: Everything was done appropriately. We are very clear about holding ourselves to high standards,” he said Tuesday at a City Hall news conference. “We do everything to the letter of the law, disclose everything and do not let it affect our decisions.”

A series of loosely related public corruption investigations coordinated by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara have trained a spotlight on de Blasio’s administration, plunging City Hall into a political crisis, generating days of scathing tabloid front pages and sinking his poll numbers. Several of the mayor’s top aides have been subpoenaed though de Blasio himself has not been accused of wrongdoing.

The Campaign for One New York last week announced it would defy a subpoena issued by the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics, and de Blasio accused the group — which has close ties to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a de Blasio rival — of “playing politics” with the probe.

New York City’s ethics agency, the Conflict of Interest Board, had issued an opinion that donors to the Campaign for One New York must not have business “pending or about to be pending” before City Hall.

Campaign for One New York had long come under fire by good government watchdogs — who called it a “shadow government” that raised $4 million and spent much of it on consultants who also did work for de Blasio’s political campaign.

De Blasio announced this year that its work was done and it would soon close. That did nothing to stem the scrutiny, which intensified in recent weeks with reports that the FBI and others were investigating the group’s donors.

Don Peebles, a real estate developer, said de Blasio called him on the phone in 2014 to solicit a $20,000 donation at a time when he had several projects going that required either city or state approval.

Peebles told The Associated Press that he gave the sum because he was a political supporter and believer in pre-kindergarten education, not because he expected favors in return.

But Peebles, a Democrat who’s considering running for de Blasio’s job in the next election, said it was a mistake for the mayor to target developers eager for access to City Hall.

“When the mayor calls it’s more difficult to say ‘No.’”

This article appeared in print on page 34 of the May 11th, 2016 edition of Hamodia.