New Yorkers are familiar with the clean hydropower the state has been producing from the waterfalls on the St. Lawrence River for the past 50 years. But, is anyone paying attention to the agency that runs these dams? The New York Power Authority is managed by political appointees who work in White Plains, a two-hour drive from Albany. The staff treats the agency like a private business, and employees call it "the company." The NYPA is owned, however, by New York state taxpayers.
Its meetings are public. Its records are subject to New York's Freedom of Information Law. Its board of directors is held to the same ethical standards as the governor or anyone who works for the highway or education departments. Readers were surprised to learn from our two-part series that the NYPA's top executives make more money than the governor, fly even short distances on state-owned airplanes and donate about $1 million a year to their pet charities.
They used public money to buy chandeliers for a theater in the governor's hometown and to throw a ski weekend for an Albany congressman. NYPA executives refused to be interviewed in person about their day-to-day business. So, I relied on records. To get started, I learned how New York's public power system fits into the national scene. The American Public Power Association (www.appanet.org) ranks public power utilities and put NYPA at No.
4 in generation. I researched a state-owned power company of similar size in South Carolina – Santee Cooper – for comparison. I filed a public records request for Santee Cooper's salaries. They refused to send electronic records but provided a paper list with last names, positions and annual salaries for employees who make more than $50,000. The records showed that 4.4 percent of Santee Cooper's public power workers made more than $100,000 per year.
I also reviewed the salaries at the New York agencies whose budgets are controlled by the legislature and the governor. The electronic records are on file at the state comptroller's office. At these agencies, 3.8 percent of employees earn more than $100,000 per year. The governor makes $179,000 per year. Getting electronic records from the NYPA proved to be more difficult. The first response was: No, it is not state policy to distribute electronic records.
So, I made an argument using opinions from the State Committee on Open Government, a branch of the Department of State. Some states, such as New York, have assigned someone within the government the task of interpreting open records and meetings laws. It is easy to search past opinions on the committee's Web site (www.dos.state.ny.us/coog/coogwww.html). New York courts ruled more than 20 years ago that government agencies could not restrict access to data simply because it was held in computers and not on paper.
Therefore, NYPA staff agreed to release electronic records. Payroll records came in a simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with names, titles and salaries for about 1,600 people. It showed 12.5 percent of employees make more than $100,000 per year. Fifteen NYPA employees make more than the governor. Using the Find option in the Edit menu, easy word searches showed how many titles contained certain terms: there are 21 with "vice president," 53 with "director," 88 with "manager" and 15 with "public" or "government affairs." We used this information in a graphic.
A simple ranking of the list also teased out telling details: A janitor makes $85,488. That compares to less than $30,000 for janitors on the ordinary state payroll. I asked the state comptroller's office and the Assembly Energy Committee what kind of documents they had received or requested in their audits and investigations of the NYPA. The comptroller's office provided procurement reports, which detailed the authority's contracts and their bidding processes.
The Assembly Energy Committee had asked for airplane records, which it said it had not received. NYPA filled my request for airplane records, which existed only on paper. I had received a tip that the governor had been overusing NYPA's airplanes, even though he had access to the state police fleet (the only other planes in state government). I split the records into piles to separate trips that included anyone who was not on my roster of NYPA employees.
I made a spreadsheet of trips taken by Gov. George Pataki and his staff. In the end, this exercise proved only that the tip did not appear to be true. The records did show, however, that NYPA executives were using the planes to travel from Albany to New York City and White Plains – trips other state employees make by train. I wanted to know about the other ways the NYPA had strayed from its original mission.
They provided an electronic copy of their vehicle report, which accounted for 798 electric-drive cars, vans and lawn mowers they had distributed in the name of green energy. The vehicles went to places such as Yankee Stadium. The authority's list of green energy projects showed new heating, air conditioning and lights at Rochester City Hall but not as many projects for Syracuse, a city that had not been represented on the NYPA's board of directors in a dozen years.
I also asked for an accounting of what the NYPA called "community support projects." I called it philanthropy. It turned out that the agency set aside $1 million per year for executives and staff to hand out to the charities of their choice. This included buying tables at fundraising galas and donating to construction-fund drives for groups in which NYPA executives are active. The agency's Excel spreadsheet showed the names of the recipients and the amount the NYPA donated.
I looked up the grant recipients' IRS 990 forms at Guidestar (www.guidestar.org) and compared their board members to the names of the NYPA employees I had in my spreadsheet. There were a lot of hits. I also looked up the home addresses of NYPA board members and executives and looked for connections between their resumes and the groups on the philanthropy list. I typed these connections into a new spreadsheet and started making phone calls.
Several grant recipients said they got their money because someone from the NYPA served on their board. Online county property records revealed that the NYPA's former president Eugene Zeltmann owned a home in Lake Placid in the Adirondack Mountains. The NYPA had contributed $55,000 to the Olympic Regional Development Authority, another state public authority. ORDA manages Whiteface Mountain in Lake Placid and the other venues used in the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Like the NYPA, the authority is headquartered a few hours' drive from Albany and beyond the eyes of the legislature and the capitol press corps. ORDA's spokesman said they used some of the power authority's money for an annual event called the Congressional Winter Challenge. It is a fantasy camp intended for Rep. John Sweeney to bring other members of Congress and their staff members to ski, play hockey and socialize.
The hope is that they will return to Washington and send federal money to the mountains. A records request at the development authority resulted in the kind of details that make a story about a winter fantasy camp come to life. They provided a copy of the invitation, the list of passengers who boarded a Washington airplane for Albany, an itinerary and team rosters. One participant was called simply "Mary S's best friend." Mary S.
is the congressman's daughter. The U.S. Olympic Committee, a nonprofit that rents space at ORDA's office, provided copies of opinions they had circulated from the House and Senate Ethics committees. Sweeney sought advice from the committees, which said that it is permissible for a member to take a privately sponsored trip in connection with his or her duties as an officeholder if the trip is for fact-finding and if the recreational activities were "merely incidental to the trip." Only one other member of Congress attended the official fact-finding trip to Lake Placid.
Other guests included at least a dozen Washington lobbyists, Sweeney family members, former Sweeney staffers and staff and relatives of NYPA executives. Sweeney lost re-election in November. It turns out no one was paying attention ORDA either. After that story, tips poured in from the North Country, located way outside our circulation area. One tipster said the agency had steered contracts for the winter weekend to its own board members who own posh resorts in Lake Placid.
Another round of records requests proved that to be true. For the past two years, ORDA paid $96,378 to a resort owned by one board member and $112,040 to a resort owned by another board member.