Battery Park City Authority Chief Defends Mass Firings
Gayle Horwitz, a former first deputy comptroller for the city who was appointed in October 2010 to head the Authority, said it was her job to bring credibility and efficiency to an agency that had been blasted by the state’s Inspector General for excessive spending and mismanagement.
“The place has so many things to fix, and for a long time I didn’t have the right team to be able to fix them. Things were just not working under that status quo," Horwitz told the Trib in an interview on Dec. 8. “Coming to work has been really unpleasant for a really, really long time because people were not willing to help out. There are all kinds of problems.”
A major concern, she noted, was the escalating cost of projects in the procurement process and how contracts were amended. “There was this environment of spend and amend,” she said. Horwitz cited the construction of outdoor art tables that were supposed to cost $265,000 and ended up with a price tag of $465,000. “And they still don’t work!” she exclaimed.
The 19 terminated staffers, who now call themselves the BPCA 19, allege that the firings were conducted in an unprofessional manner, and are seeking additional severance pay and further compensation that they believe they are owed.
”It was the most unprofessional treatment of employees I’ve ever experienced,” said the group’s spokesman, Hector Calderon, the director of diversity programs and 17-year Authority employee. Calderon said his abrupt dismissal was especially painful because he had saved the life of a co-worker on Sept. 11 and, after that, assisted in the recovery efforts in Battery Park City.
“We want to be treated with dignity,” he said.
“The people who were fired were the people who made Battery Park City successful,” said another former employee, who asked not to be identified. “It seems like poor payback.”
Among those terminated were two members of former BPCA President James Cavanaugh’s “inner circle” who were cited in the Inspector General’s report. The findings, which were highly critical of Cavanaugh, included inaccurate record keeping for mileage reimbursement by one of the employees and, from another, the refusal to answer questions posed by the Inspector General.
Horwitz said that employee interviews recently conducted by an audit firm uncovered “information that gave you cause for concern and areas we needed to take a look at.” She declined to elaborate on those concerns.
In addition, she said a staff “restructuring” was necessary to meet the future needs of Battery Park City, the 92-acre development that is now nearly complete. “We definitely had more people than there was work for,” she said.
But the terminated workers tell a far different story. They describe themselves as a dedicated team of longtime employees whose years of service have gone unappreciated by the new administration under Horwitz and its board chairman, William Thompson.
“We were the people who built that city,” Calderon said.
In an interview, Leticia Remauro, a former vice president in charge of community relations, pointed to the area’s post-Sept. 11 recovery, numerous planning and design awards, and the recent accolades of Community Board 1’s Battery Park City Committee—which voted on Tuesday to write personal letters of recommendation for all 19 terminated employees—as evidence of the good work that the staff was doing.
Furthermore, Remauro said, it was up to Horwitz as CEO to coach staff members who were failing to meet her work standards.
“You could not get in to see her. She would be rude. She would yell,” Remauro said, adding that Horwitz was vague about her expectations with staff. “She would reprimand people in public.”
The BPCA 19 sent a letter to the Authority’s board requesting a chance to address it at its next meeting. (That meeting, which was to take place next Tuesday, will be rescheduled due to the lack of a quorum, according to Anne Fenton, an aide to Horwitz.)
“I do believe these gentlemen [on the board] are professional gentlemen and I believe when they recognize it was handled in an unprofessional manner they will do what they can,” Remauro said.
Among their demands, the BPCA 19 is seeking paid health insurance for six months and six months severance pay, instead of the three weeks they were given. Remauro and Calderon said the last two terminated BPCA employees received six months severance.
But according to Horwitz, those two people were given “separation agreements” in exchange for signing a release promising not to disparage the Authority—a practice criticized in the Inspector General’s report.
“They were silenced basically,” Horwitz said. “I did not go down that path because it really goes against public policy, and if you’ve noticed in the past month everyone has been saying whatever they want to say.”
Horwitz met with the entire staff on the morning of Nov. 9, informing them that there would be layoffs as part of an ongoing reorganization at the Authority. Everyone was instructed to go back to their offices, after which a Human Resources Department employee handed out the termination notices.
“This difficult decision has been made as part of an overall restructuring of the Authority’s operations to better meet the changing needs of the organization,” the letter stated.
The letter informed the employees that their jobs were being terminated as of that day, that their medical insurance would end after Nov. 30, and that staff members would be paid for all accrued leave time.
The letter, signed by Horwitz, ended with a single sentence that offered little comfort to terminated employees—some of whom had worked for the Authority for two decades.
“Thank you for your service to the Battery Park City Authority,” it said.
“Why wouldn’t you take these professional people and sit them in a room and individually exit them out?” asked Remauro, a 12-year veteran of the Authority.
The former employees complained that they were only given a few short hours to pack up and leave, and had no chance to pass along information about the projects they were working on and where to find files.
Horwitz said it is standard practice for terminated employees to be given limited access to files, and the action was necessary to protect the Authority.
“Unfortunately, you have to protect the assets of the organization. It is very standard for computers to be turned off and for people to be only given a few hours to pack their things,” she said.
According to Horwitz, her decision to lay off the workers was not made lightly, but came only after giving much time and thought to the future needs of the Authority.
“I could have just come to work, collected my paycheck, gone home and not have deal with this. It obviously would have been a lot easier for everybody,” she said. “I don’t relish what happened.”
By Jessica Terrell and Carl Glassman