Police were called to City Hall Thursday afternoon after supporters of New Haven’s embattled fair-hiring director crashed a closed-door board meeting called to weigh her fate.
Accusations were hurled back and forth. Documents moved in bins from one building to another. The meeting was called off.
That was the latest episode in the ongoing saga of the Harp administration’s battle with Nichole Jefferson, executive director of the Commission on Equal Opportunities (CEO), which monitors the hiring of women, blacks and Latinos on government-funded construction projects.
The administration has completed an investigation into what it called unethical behavior on Jefferson’s part. It has placed her on administrative leave, and now begun the process of possibly firing her. On Wednesday officials held a pre-termination hearing with Jefferson and her city managerial union president, Cherlyn Poindexter. Then on Thursday it brought copies of its final investigation report to brief members of the CEO board in a specially called meeting.
Jefferson and her union president, Cherlyn Poindexter, charged that the city has carried out a political vendetta against Jefferson. They released copies of the report Thursday and rebutted the charges, which included alleged shakedowns and “arbitrary” fines of contractors.
They also showed up with Jefferson’s husband, daughter and staffers to observe the CEO meeting in a second-floor City Hall meeting room.
“We Should All Go In There!”
Paul Bass Photo
The CEO voted to go into executive session to discuss the report. The board kicked supporters out of the room. They waited in the hall outside the door.
Jefferson showed up a few minutes after the meeting began. She waited in the hall with her supporters.
Jefferson’s boss, city Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson, entered the room to participate.
“He can’t go in there! He’s not allowed!” her supporters called out.
Nemerson moved to close the door and keep them out in the hall. “This is an executive session,” he said.
It didn’t work.
“This can’t be executive session. What do you make your own rules?” demanded CEO compliance monitor Rob Glass.
“We should all go in there!” someone else called out.
Jefferson and her supporters streamed into the room.
“You’re going to discuss me in executive session, you don’t give me a chance to say anything Mr. [John] Rose?” Jefferson, standing inside the doorway, remarked to …
… the city’s corporation counsel (at right in photo), who sat at the head of a conference table with commission Chair Juan Scott (at left).
She noted that she had had hand-delivered to her home a notice about the special meeting, called to consider the “investigation into the performance and employment of Nichole Jefferson.”
“You gave me a document that I can come to the meeting, then you don’t let me into the meeting?”
Rose responded that the commission had gone into executive session.
Poindexter argued that under labor rules, Jefferson had the right to demand a public meeting.
“You don’t even have a quorum!” she added
She and Jefferson argued that the CEO ordinance requires a quorum of five members to hold a commission meeting.
The commission originally did have five members show up. But one of them, Alan Felder (pictured), demanded that his picture not be taken by reporters. Then he left in protest of the photography.
That left four members. The commission has nine seats. But two are currently unfilled. So Scott and Rose concluded that there was a quorum — four of seven members.
Once Poindexter and Jefferson cited the ordinance, they changed their minds. The meeting was adjourned.
Jefferson supporters remained, some yelling at the commissioners. A security guard was called, then downtown cops. Poindexter convinced everyone to leave the building with no further incident.
“Arbitrary” Fines, Shakedowns Alleged
Meanwhile, Jefferson and Poindexter shared the contents of the investigation with reporters. She pointed to two accusations that they said dominated their discussion with the city Wednesday:
• That Jefferson violated the ethics rules.
• That she “sought to issue arbitrary fines to construction organizations whose work on operations for the CEO agency she enforced.”
The report included sworn affidavits to support the charges.
One affidavit came from longtime local contractor Brack G. Poitier, who co-founded Tri-Con Construction Managers, a minority-owned and run firm.
In 2013, while working on a city-backed housing development on Orchard Street, Poitier claimed, Jefferson pressured him to hire students from a separate not-for-profit organization she runs called Construction Workforce Initiative 2, which runs an apprenticeship training school. Poitier said when he didn’t, he got a “frivolous” $4,200 fine.
Thursday, Jefferson denied the accusation. From a vast folder of documents she retrieved photos of 13 employees she said Poitier never paid. “We were after him for not paying his workers,” she said.
Another affidavit came from Artnel Banton, who runs a company called Lab Restoration & Construction. He charted that after the CEO fined him in 2004 for failing to hire women, he had a meeting in Jefferson’s office.
“[S]he locked the door behind her and I sat down. Ms. Jefferson told me I was not in compliance at the job cite [sic] during the one day site check and that the project would be shut down for noncompliance.
“Ms. Jefferson then proceeded to tell me that if I gave her $15,000.00 I would ‘never have any problems’ with working on City of New Haven construction projects going forward. … I understood that Ms. Jefferson was seeking a bribe and extorting me and my company.” He stated he never paid the money, and did not subsequently get fined — but did find it “impossible … to secure contract work with the City of New Haven.”
Jefferson denied the accusations. She said the alleged meeting never took place.
“He hires people and doesn’t pay them,” Jefferson said. She said at the time of the dispute, Banton had failed to pay a $678 fine: “He can’t pay a $678 fine — but I’m going to take him into a room” and seek $15,000?
She produced a letter that politically connected Rev. Bosie Kimber had written on Banton’s behalf to city officials seeking to have the penalty erased, as well as a print-out of this 2005 New Haven Independent article about Banton failing to pay employees.
Poindexter added that the alleged incident occurred 11 years ago: “If it was really true, shouldn’t he have taken it up 11 years ago? Why are we hearing this story now? It should have been taken up with the administration.” She said it’s moot now. Nemerson later argued that “it doesn’t matter when it happened. These are affidavits. There is no statute of limitations on the kind of stuff in this report.”
Another affidavit was sworn to by Raymond C. Galvin, Jr., senior vice-president of a contractor on the Alexion Pharmaceuticals 100 College Street office tower soon to open. He reported that in 2014 he received from Jefferson, on her city email account, information about a fundraiser for CWI 2’s training school. He said he received an invitation to attend the fundraiser, and that he couldn’t tell that CWI 2 was separate from city government. He said he contributed $10,000 the fundraiser. He reported that Jefferson then pressured him to write letters to subcontractors to hire apprentices from CWI 2, and “expressed her disappointment” when he hadn’t yet sent them. He claimed that the CEO issued “potential fines” to the subcontractors, then were called into a meeting to “discuss” the “matter.” He added that the CEO “was not properly tracking” the certified payroll. Meanwhile, Jefferson allegedly told the subcontractors they could avoid public embarrassment and future fines if they hire CWI 2 graduates.
Thursday, Jefferson said she never issued such threats or exerted such pressure. She said she did want contractors to hire CWI 2 graduates, and pointed to the city’s development agreement for 100 College, which calls for hiring people from CWI 2.
In a separate affidavit, CEO contract compliance worker Olga Bonilla “orchestrated a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada for herself and the CEO staff members,” paid for by the city. “Ms. Jefferson instructed the CEO staff members to keep quiet about the 2006 trip to Las Vegas to avoid the City of New Haven learning of the trip.” Jefferson denied that accusation, too. She said the trip was on the up and up, concerning federal regulations, and she produced staff memos documenting it at the time.
Continued Next Week
The investigation concluded that Jefferson also “used without authorization City resources and time”; “failed to cooperate with this investigation”; and “operated a private entity, CWI 2, and, through misrepresentation, used the goodwill of the City to benefit the Career Development School, and by extension, CWI 2.”
Jefferson and Poindexter said that at Wednesday pre-termination meeting, city officials said they were no longer pursuing those three charges, and that they recognized that Jefferson had set up and run CWI 2 under the express direction of the previous mayoral administration.
“That’s not true,” Matthew Nemerson said later. All five charges remain in play as he and other officials prepare a report for Mayor Toni Harp with a recommendation of whether or not to fire Jefferson.
He said that recommendation won’t be ready until next week. He said Jefferson’s side provided lots of information at Wednesday’s meeting that his team wants to examine.
On The Move
As Jefferson and Poindexter discussed the case outside City Hall, employees of Bridgeport-based Four Stars Movers Inc. were taking an elevator ride to the fourth floor of the Hall of Records city office building at 200 Orange St.
They were in the process of moving barrels of documents out of the office of the CEO.
Jefferson and Poindexter charged that the city was destroying documents en masse in order to remove evidence that would exonerate Jefferson.
Some of the boxes and bins ended up back at City Hall on the sixth floor. There, in the city business development office, the CEO is moving into a new space.
Not all the documents ended up there.
Nemerson and the woman now running the CEO, Lil Synder, said in a subsequent interview in Nemerson’s office that the city has been going through all the documents at the CEO, for two reasons.
One: The federal government has required local agencies like the CEO to computerize payroll inspection records, not rely on hand documents. New Haven’s CEO was “the last department left in America still using paper records,” Nemerson alleged. Under state and federal guidelines, the city is supposed to get rid of payroll certification documents going back more than a few years, he said. The city is shredding those documents to protect people’s private information, he said. It is also throwing out “non-official” documents like memos from the early 2000s.
Meanwhile, the city wants to get a handle on the CEO’s records, Nemerson said. Rather than seeking to destroy documents, it’s trying to learn what has happened at the CEO before Jefferson was put on paid leave in March, he said. Until then his staff did not have access to CEO records, he said.
“We can’t find any documents” about how people were paid on job sites or spreadsheets on companies’ overall performance, he said. “There are no documents on the computers. File cabinets were empty.
On March 18, the day the city placed Jefferson on leave, she and a crew cleaned out the contents of CWI 2’s training school on Dixwell Avenue, loading the contents into two U‑Hauls and a third truck. She said at the time (in video) that the property belonged to her agency, not to the city. Subsequently the city discovered that the inside of the building had been destroyed, with cement poured down drains. Jefferson charged that the city probably did all that to make her look bad; city officials said that only Jefferson had keys to the building and access to the alarm system. (Read about that here and here.)
Jefferson said she’s ready to contest any termination move brought against her, with reams of documents to back her up.
“I kept everything,” she said.