City Hall staff told: Hush up!
Confidentiality pact
What happens in City Hall better stay in City Hall.
Amid more than a half-dozen probes of Mayor de Blasio’s administration, a number of municipal workers have been asked to sign a confidentiality agreement that makes it clear they should shut their traps when it comes to city business, it was reported Monday.
Gothamist wrote that “scores of City Hall staffers” were asked to immediately sign the agreement, an image of which the news site posted online.
But the mayor’s office denied knowledge of the document and said no one at City Hall had been asked to sign it.
The form posted online refers to two parts of the City Charter prohibiting public servants from revealing city business unless it involves “conduct which the public servant knows or reasonably believes to involve waste, inefficiency, corruption, criminal activity, or conflict of interest.”
Unlike the forms city workers sign when they are hired and when they leave, this one specifically warns against disclosing privileged info to outsiders.
“There’s never been anything like this,” an official who worked for a prior administration told The Post upon reviewing the online document.
City Hall spokeswoman Karen Hinton said early Monday that officials were trying to find out if any agencies had circulated the form.
By day’s end, she said, “The mayor’s office is not aware of any agency using the document in the Gothamist story.”
The reporter who wrote the story, Christopher Robbins, told The Post, “We stand by the story and trust our sources.”
The report comes more than a month after de Blasio gave a pep talk to about 60 staffers at City Hall hours after it was revealed that a senior aide and others close to him were subpoenaed as part of investigations into his fund-raising.
“It was really just [the mayor] addressing the elephant in the room,” a source told The Post of the late-April pow-wow, first reported by Gothamist. “You can’t see those headlines every day and think it won’t affect staff morale.”
“Morale is high,” the source added. “Everyone is confident no one did anything wrong.”
Another senior aide called the meeting a chance for the mayor to “urge all of us to continue doing the people’s work” in the face of negative media.
The mayor has cut down on his public appearances as of late, taking questions from the press just once a week on average.