A $35 business proposition — among other offenses — cost a city teacher $10,000.
Fay Inovlotska paid two students $35 earlier this year to hand out flyers promoting a daycare center with which she was associated, according to a report today from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board. That behavior violated rules prohibiting city employees from using their positions for personal gain, COIB concluded.
Inovlotska — who earned just over $80,000 from the city last year, according to payroll data collected by the transparency website SeeThroughNY — agreed to pay a $10,000 fine to the Department of Education for the behavior “and other conduct,” according to COIB’s press release.
Exactly what the other conduct was isn’t specified in COIB’s announcement. But Inovlotska’s case came to COIB from the office of Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon, who looks into allegations of fraud and corruption in the DOE. Condon publicizes only a fraction of SCI’s reports, even when allegations are substantiated.
The only way to see unpublicized reports that Condon has forwarded to the DOE or to the ethics board is to file a Freedom of Information Law request, which we have done.
SCI has published just seven investigation reports this year, down from 15 in 2010, 12 in 2009, 19 in 2008, and a high of 26 in 2007. The 26 reports released in 2007 reflected just 8 percent of all of the allegations that Condon’s office substantiated.
Another SCI report, released in May, documented how the DOE’s former chief financial officer, George Raab, used his city email account to discuss investments and line up a new job in the private sector. COIB announced yesterday that Raab had agreed to pay a $6,500 fine in that case…..
“The biggest problem for the state is the enormous, recurring structural budget gap starting next year and into the future,” said E.J. McMahon of the conservative-leaning Empire Center. “Cuomo clearly hopes that starting in 2021, (Democratic presidential candidate Joseph) Biden and a Democratic Congress will provide states and local government a couple of year’s worth of added stimulus. Read More
Ed McKinley
ALBANY — When the New York Constitution was reorganized nearly 100 years ago to give the governor more power over the budget process, noted there was a risk of making “the governor a czar."
M Read More
Michael Gormley
ALBANY — A new study by a conservative think tank says President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law gave most New Yorkers a tax cut, even as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo insists on repealing the measure because he says it will cost New Yo Read More
Johan Sheridan
ALBANY, N.Y. () — The Empire Center filed a against the state Department of Health on Friday.
“This case isn’t about assigning blame or embarrassing political leaders,” said Bill Hammond, the Empire Center’s Read More
The Empire Center first reported Tuesday that grants — 226 of them, totaling $46 million, to recipients selected by the governor and individual state lawmakers — seemed to still be going ahead. Read More
With lingering questions about how the novel coronavirus killed thousands of New Yorkers who lived in nursing homes, a group of state lawmakers is pushing to create an independent commission to get answers from the state Department of Health. Read More
“The importance of discussing this and getting the true facts out is to understand what did and didn’t happen so we can learn from it in case this happens again,” Hammond said. Read More
No doubt, the Health Department and the governor would like this report to be the final word on the subject.
But if it’s all the same with them, we’d still like a truly independent review. Read More