As federal investigators dug into allegations that Mayor Bill de Blasio had traded favors for political donations, a senior official at a city agency at the center of the probe was demoted and given a sharp pay cut.
That official, Geneith Turnbull, has filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging that her demotion was motivated by discrimination and was meant to punish her for standing up to her supervisors.
Turnbull was a deputy commissioner at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services until she was demoted in February 2017, in what City Hall said was a reorganization of the agency. The lawsuit, filed this month in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, accused the city of demoting Turnbull in retaliation for repeatedly voicing concerns about a pay raise given to one of her subordinates, who she believed had in some way helped to protect de Blasio during the federal investigation.
The lawsuit also alleges that her demotion was part of a pattern of discrimination against older, minority employees at the agency. Turnbull is black.
Turnbull was demoted on the same day that Ricardo Morales, another senior employee at the administrative services agency, was fired. Morales has filed a notice of claim with the city in preparation for a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit; Morales had resisted pressure from City Hall over negotiations between his agency and Harendra Singh, a mayoral donor who did business with the city.
The administrative services agency was at the center of several cases that drew scrutiny from federal investigators, including that of Singh and another case involving the procurement of mint-scented trash bags meant to repel rats. Investigators ultimately brought no charges.
Turnbull, a veteran civil servant, was in charge of the Office of Citywide Procurement in 2015, when the city signed a contract to buy millions of dollars of the mint-scented bags for the Parks Department. The purchase occurred after the owner of the company that made the bags, Joseph Dussich, contributed $100,000 to a nonprofit group established by the mayor to support his agenda.
A year later, federal investigators started asking questions, and in July 2016, Turnbull was told that lawyers for de Blasio wanted to speak with the employees involved in the trash bag contract, according to the lawsuit.
One of those employees, it said, was a subordinate of Turnbull’s who acted as a contracting officer.
According to the lawsuit, some time after he met with lawyers for the mayor, the contracting officer informed Turnbull that he had a job offer from another city agency and wanted a substantial raise to remain at the administrative services department. In September 2016, Turnbull said, she was instructed by a senior official to offer the contracting officer a large raise; she objected, saying that it violated city guidelines for employee pay increases.
The agency’s commissioner, Lisette Camilo, nonetheless quickly approved the raise, increasing the contracting officer’s pay to $132,500, an increase of nearly 20 percent, the lawsuit says.
The court papers said that Turnbull persisted in raising objections to Camilo and another senior official, telling them that the pay increase appeared to be “a quid pro quo reward to him” for somehow “protecting” the de Blasio administration during the federal probe.
Then in February 2017 Turnbull was demoted to the job of procurement analyst and her salary cut to $91,169 from $199,000, according to the lawsuit.
Samuel O. Maduegbuna, a lawyer for Turnbull, said he had no evidence that the supervisor protected the mayor during the trash bag investigation but characterized the timing of the raise as “very suspicious.”
Kimberly Joyce, a spokeswoman for the city’s law department, said in a written statement, “This raise was based on merit, something these claims lack.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.