Library boss’ $800G nixed
City pols, gov and AG step in
The trustees of the Queens Library won’t be giving their controversial director, Thomas Galante, an $800,000 golden parachute after all. In fact, it looks like several of them won’t be trustees for much longer.
Following a furious outcry from key city and state elected officials on Wednesday and Thursday, library officials postponed a vote that they had hastily scheduled for Thursday evening to consider an amendment to Galante’s contract. It would have allowed him to resign from his $392,000-a-year post and get a lucrative, two-year consulting job worth $800,000.
Public Advocate Letitia James and Queens Borough President Melinda Katz immediately blasted the pending deal as “shameful” when they learned of it. The Daily News earlier this year drew attention to the Queens Library’s questionable expenditures under Galante, including more than $27,000 he spent to build a private smoking deck adjacent to his office. The FBI and the city’s Department of Investigation also have launched probes of the library library’s s contract contracting policies.
The protests from rom James and Katz prompted state tate Attorney General Eric Schneiderman hneiderman to intercede. His office, fice, questioning the scheduled d vote, urged in a letter to the trustees stees late Thursday that they ey postpone the meeting, said d a source.
“We do not believe lieve the trustees can fulfill their fiduciaary duties to the library by voting on the proposed agreement,” a Schneiderman aide wrote, threatening to issue a subpoena for library records to determine if state laws governing nonprofit organizations were being violated.
Around the same time, Gov. Cuomo stepped into the fray. The governor quickly signed into law a bill that reforms the library’s governance. It empowers Mayor de Blasio and Katz, each of whom appoints half of the library’s trustees, to remove those appointees at will.
“Those entrusted to serve the public have a responsibility to act in the public’s best interest,” Cuomo said in a statement. “It’s clear that wasn’t happening here and additional accountability was needed.”
Until now, a majority of the library’s trustees had resisted calls from Katz, James and most of Queens’ elected officials to remove Galante and to make the library’s financial operations more transparent. That same majority also refused to open the library’s books to an audit from city Controller Scott Stringer.
Katz thus welcomed the governor’s quick signing of the new law. “Soon Soon we we’re re going t to make a decision on how to rem remove folks (from the board board),” she said.
City t taxpayers, Katz notes, p provide more than 85% of t the organization’s funding funding, so the public has a right t to know how that money i is spent.