Brooklyn Bridge, July 13 – On Monday night
two large trucks of Ahern Painting Contractors were at
work beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, water-cleaning the
underpinning. Public money at work on a public landmark —
by a contractor whose history with this exact bridge is a
matter of federal court record.
In 2016, Ahern paid $656,000 to settle U.S.
Attorney's claims of Disadvantaged Business Enterprise
fraud on two federally funded New York projects — passing
invoices through a defunct DBE that supplied nothing — and
was suspended government-wide by the Federal Highway
Administration pending debarment.
Then in 2019, the U.S. Attorney for the
SDNY sued Ahern again, this time over the Brooklyn Bridge
itself and Queens Plaza: per the complaint and Ahern's own
settlement admissions that November, false statements were
submitted to NYC DOT and the MTA claiming a disadvantaged
business did work actually performed by a non-DBE, with a
$10,000 kickback and an Atlantic City trip in the mix.
Seven years later, the trucks are back under the bridge,
spraying away.
So on July 13, Inner City Press filed
Freedom of Information Law requests with two offices: NYC
DOT, for the contract, its value, the bid documents, and
above all the vendor responsibility determination — how an
agency that Ahern admitted deceiving weighed those
admissions before hiring it again for the same structure;
and the NYC Comptroller, whose Charter Section 328 power
to object to registering a contract on integrity grounds
either was exercised here or wasn't.
The Comptroller's office published a report
just this April titled "Sunlight in the City," a blueprint
for FOIL best practices; Inner City Press has asked it to
live up to its own blueprint. What the responsibility
files show — diligence, or a rubber stamp for a repeat
settler — is what these FOILs will reveal. Watch this
site.
