Brad Jordan’s Conflicts of Interest

Kingston’s government, that great cesspool into which loungers and idlers are irresistibly drained – Apologies to Arthur Conan Doyle

April 14, 2021

Kingston, NY – Almost four years ago, developers Brad Jordan and Joe Bonura Jr. bought the rights to develop the parking lot at 21 N. Front St as part of their proposed Kingstonian luxury housing project. The 2016 Request for Qualifications shows Jordan violated conflict of interest prohibitions by continuing to serve on the Police Commission and the Kingston Local Development Corporation. Also in violation of the RFQ, he attended meetings where most of a $10 million state grant was allocated to his project or neighboring areas.

The failure by City Hall to publish pertinent documents dated 2017 but that surfaced only recently indicates Mayor Steve Noble may have sought to downplay his knowledge of that conflict of interest.

Drawn up when architect Andrew Wright sold his rights to the new developers, would these documents have provoked outrage? They certainly would have led to revisiting the RFQ, where the prohibition on conflict of interest jumps off the page, and in turn might have led to closer scrutiny of Jordan. And making public the letter of assignment might have raised questions of whether architect Andrew Wright was paid more than just $50,000, which in turn would have led to calls to identify the investors. The developers have refused to name the LLC’s members on grounds it is a trade secret.

Conflict of Interest Passage

The RFQ contains a clear prohibition on conflict of interest on p. 12. “No official or employee of city of Kingston shall have any personal interest, direct or indirect, in this transaction, nor shall any such elected or appointed official, department head, agent or employee having such an interest participate in any decision, meeting, evaluation or exert any opinion or influence relating to this transaction that affects his or her personal interests or the interests of any person or entity in which he or she is directly or indirectly, interested.” Jordan sat on the KLDC from the mid 1990s until a few months ago, and he still sits on the Police Commission. Dance all you want around the source of charter and statute, but Jordan was an appointed official to two of the most important bodies in Kingston, and during that time, he paid architect Andrew Wright $50,000 for the right to earn hundreds of millions of dollars, and then his minions in local government heaped on tens of millions more.

Jordan also attended meetings where the $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant was under discussion for allocation. In her RadioKingston show May 24, 2019, Hillary Harvey said Jordan attended but stopped going toward the end of the process. None of the three people she was interviewing, who were part of the DRI allocation committee, contradicted her.

Assignment

The letter of assignment from Wright to Jordan, dated June 19, 2017, may have been kept under wraps until March of this year. The letter is absent from the City of Kingston’s website under the Kingstonian directories. The first copy of the letter of assignment that the Vindicator saw appears in the March 2021 resolution packet delivered to the Common Council in preparation for the vote on the transfer of the N. Front St. property to KLDC. (Why would the Common Council wish to transfer the property to KLDC? Because that way, the City can circumvent bidding requirements.)

Curiously, on p. 40 in the packet for the council, the letter of assignment is stamped as having been received by County Clerk’s office as part of a lawsuit filed against Jordan and Bonura by developer Neil Bender. In other words, if it hadn’t been for the lawsuit, no one might ever have seen the letter of assignment.

The City’s Consent

Once an assignment is made, there must be a letter of consent from the city, according to Bullet Point 4 of the letter of assignment. But where is that letter of consent? Not on the website, to be sure. Luckily, it is to be found in the documentation filed in response to Bender’s lawsuit. It looks like it was granted quickly, on June 26, 2017.

Bullet Point 5 calls for a new “binding contract whereby the City agrees to retain the Assignee” to develop the parking lot. Where is that binding contract? Nowhere to be found.

Andrew Wright’s $50K

Nor has there been discussion of why a sophisticated architect such as Andrew Wright would accept a paltry $50,000 when profit could reach into the hundreds of millions after a few decades.

In Wright’s original proposal, the financing was to be provided by Robert Kapito, one of the founders of BlackRock. It strains credulity to believe that Wright could not secure financing, the reason he gave for ceding his rights. By the spring of 2017, it was clear former President Donald Trump was going to cut taxes, and the Opportunity Zone concept had been around since 2015. It is hard to believe that Wright and Kapito wouldn’t have pushed for a share of the investment pie.

Conclusion:

The latest findings follow a pattern of impropriety if not outright corruption that has dogged local elected and appointed officials since the project’s inception.

It would have been the perfect trifecta if Brad Jordan also sat on the Ethics Commission, which he did during Mayor Shayne Gallo’s tenure, and probably would have continued to do had Mayor Noble not weakened the Ethics Law and dissolved that commission in 2016 – a sad exemplar for government behavior and transparency in Kingston and Ulster County. Today, three seats are vacant on the five-member Ethics Board.

Is it possible that right from the start the idea was to hire Wright to provide cover for Jordan so he could continue in his powerful positions on the KLDC and Police Commission?

Or was Wright a true contender who was then made an offer he couldn’t refuse, i.e. a piece of the LLC investment pie that was just too good to pass up? What is BlackRock’s involvement?

Or does the Mayor’s office simply not care about putting documents online?

Or is there another explanation?

After watching the City Hall’s shenanigans over the past few years, including trying to bury letters calling for an environmental review and firing their authors, the observer cannot assume anything is a chance mistake. These documents were not publicized, and anyone who knows Steve Noble knows there has to be a reason.

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Ed. Note: This piece was written with insights provided by an attorney with good knowledge of local politics.