Paul Bass Photos
Investigator Bayonne detailed “abuses of power.”
Jefferson: It’s a witchhunt.
Accusing her of “intimidation, attempted bribery and corruption,” Mayor Toni Harp Thursday fired Nichole Jefferson from her post as executive director of the Commission on Equal Opportunities.
Harp informed Jefferson of the decision by a hand-delivered and certified-mail letter.
The CEO monitors contractors’ compliance with laws requiring them to hire blacks, Latinos and women on government-funded construction projects.
Harp’s letter accused Jefferson of violating the city’s code of ethics and “abus[ing] your power as a City employee” and CEO director. The letter cited the findings of an investigation conducted for her administration by attorney Michael Bayonne. Bayonne concluded that Jefferson shook down contractors whose work she oversaw to contribute money to, or hire apprentices from, a separate not-for-profit agency she ran, the Construction Workforce Initiative 2 (CWI2), a now-shuttered training-school on Dixwell Avenue. Bayonne also found that Jefferson repeatedly refused to provide documents or otherwise cooperate with the investigation since the administration placed her on administrative leave on March 18.
“You have engaged in intimidation, attempted bribery and corruption with contractors doing business with the City of New Haven,” Harp wrote. “In addition, you used City time and resources to create and operate a separate entity, Career Compliance Placement, LLC. At no time did you disclose that you had created such an entity.
“Moreover … you operated a private entity, CWI2 and, through misrepresentations, used the City to further benefit your private entity. You even sought donations for your private entity from the contractors whose employment practices you were entrusted to enforce while affiliating yourself with the City despite being warned not to do so. You also misrepresented to the State when applying for grant funds that your private entity was affiliated with the City of New Haven.”
The administration Thursday released the full investigatory report. It includes letters and other documents, some on CEO stationery, in which Jefferson identified the CEO and CWI2 as affiliated organizations working together to, for instance, raise money. The report disclosed that Jefferson had an $85,000 consulting contract with the state through CWI2 and reported spending “100 percent” of her time on that job while also working for the city, collecting a total of $135,321 through CWI2 from July 1, 2011 through June 30, 2012. The report accuses her of theft of city time by allegedly running both organizations at once, and using a city government address at times for CWI2 and signing fundraising letters as the CEO director. It also cites an ad which described CWI2 as “managed by” CEO.
“Ms. Jefferson has been grossly insubordinate, dishonest, has engaged in multiple ethical violations, bribery, has stolen time and resources from the City, has been derelict in her duties, has abused her power and violated the public’s trust,” Bayonne wrote.
Harp (pictured) said in an interview Thursday that she acted to protect the “integrity” of the city’s fair-hiring agency.
“We had begged her for her 990s [federal tax returns], for her bylaws, for her minutes. We never got anything. When we started digging deeper, we got concerned.
“We had contractors complaining. We had employees complaining. The more we looked into it, the more concerned we were.”
Jefferson released portions of the investigatory report to reporters last week. She adamantly denied all the allegations. She accused the Harp administration of conducting a political vendetta against her. She also said, in reference to accusations of conflicts of interest between her two roles (running government’s CEO and the private CWI2), that she was continuing an arrangement created and sanctioned by the previous DeStefano administration. (Click here to read about that.)
Her union president, Cherlyn Poindexter of AFSCME Local 3144, said Thursday afternoon that she has already filed a grievance with the city over the firing. She has asked the city to agree to take the matter straight to the state labor board.
“They didn’t have just cause to terminate her employment,” Poindexter said. “These charges are all bogus.”
U‑Hauls & Cement
Thursday’s firing was the latest episode in an ongoing drama that has featured destruction of property and alleged destruction of documents.
Jefferson and allies cleared out the Dixwell Avenue training school, filling two U‑Hauls and another truck, the night she was placed on leave; she denied removing documents that night. (See above video.) The city owns the building; officials subsequently broke a lock to enter it and discovered it had been trashed, down to having concrete poured into drains. Jefferson denied having anything to do with the damage; she said she suspected the city of damaging the building to make her look bad. She also said her organization had the only access to an alarm system on the property, and members of her organization responded to alarms when the city entered.
Jefferson and union President Poindexter also accused the city of destroying CEO documents to erase any records that would support their side. City Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson and interim CEO chief Lil Snyder said they were having records moved to a new CEO office in City Hall and, with state guidance, destroying routine older records. They said in fact they have been unable to locate years worth of key CEO records. (Read more about that in this story.)
Jefferson and her supporters crashed an executive-session CEO board meeting last week held in City Hall to discuss the report. The meeting ended amid a dispute over how to calculate a quorum when two board positions are unfilled, depending on whether Robert’s Rules of Order or the city ordinance governing CEO take precedence. Security, then police, were called to the scene amid yelling taunts from, among others, Jefferson’s husband Edward, who is also listed in state records as the vice-president of Career Compliance Placement LLC (with Nichole Jefferson listed as president).
Old School
Edward Jefferson being escorted by security out of last week’s CEO meeting.
Mixing government and non-government fund-raising was an accepted practice in the DeStefano administration. A former budget director, for instance, mailed letters to city contractors with whom he does business instructing them (not “asking” them) to fork over specific sums of money to the mayor’s reelection campaign. He even included the tickets they were to buy in the envelope. (He did say “please.”) He similarly solicited contributions for his favored charities, with the support of the mayor, from companies with whom he was doing city business. For years the DeStefano administration also had a top economic development official simultaneously running quasi-public not-for-profits that distributes hundreds of thousands of dollars in government loans without public oversight.
Similarly, that administration approved the creation of CWI2 as a separate entity run simultaneously by the government official responsible for monitoring the work of contractors who would be solicited to financially support the school.
Part of Bayonne’s investigatory report indeed focuses on policy decisions made by the DeStefano administration. For instance, it details how the mayoral appointed CEO board voted in a 2007 telephone meeting to allow Jefferson to convert an earlier version of CWI2, which ran out of her office, into the separate not-for-profit. Investigator Bayonne reported he could not find any minutes of that meeting. “Further, it does not appear that this meeting was noticed or otherwise held pursuant to the Connecticut Freedom of Information,” he concluded. The same happened at a second emergency CEO board meeting two days later for which the agenda included approving CWI2’s incorporation and bylaws and the designation of “Nichole Jefferson with signatory power of all CWI2 contracts and matters of the organization.” The lack of minutes or public notice from the meeting led the investigator to question whether the group’s creation was even legal in the first place.
The new investigatory report does go beyond those issues by accusing Jefferson of defying orders to act more ethically and of threatening to punish non-contributors.
Despite “written warnings,” investigator Bayonne wrote, “Ms. Jefferson engaged in exactly what the Office of Corporation Counsel forbade her from doing. She threatened contractors with fines as a means of extorting donations for the use of CWI2. Ms. Jefferson abused her power to extract money from contractors by ensuring the contractors they would be immune from her fines in exchange for money.”
The report includes 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.
In last week’s interview, 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 charged 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.”
Melissa Bailey Photo
Officials break ground on 100 College in 2013.
Another affidavit was sworn to by Raymond C. Galvin, Jr., senior vice-president of a contractor on the 13-story 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.
Jefferson said she never issued such threats or exerted such pressure. She said she did want contractors to hire CWI2 graduates, and pointed to the city’s development agreement for 100 College, which calls for hiring people from CWI2.
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.
Previous coverage of this story:
• Items Removed From Agency Under Investigation
• Who Poured Cement In The Drains?
• CEO Chief Reveals, Rebuts Accusations
• This Loo Was Left Behind — With Cement