Albany County District Attorney David Soares talks about a report issued by the county Comptroller’s Office criticizing him for using state grants to give himself a bonus during a news conference on April 6 at a vacant lot on Second Street in Albany.
ALBANY — It’s payback time in Albany County.
Or maybe you think it’s a coincidence that David Soares has decided to investigate the county’s process for awarding funding soon after county officials commissioned an outside investigation into bonuses the district attorney paid himself from state grant money?
I suppose it could be. Certainly, the county’s funding process deserves investigation, given recent revelations.
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For those of you who are late to the story, here’s the gist: The county legislature was set to give a $25,000 American Rescue Plan grant to an organization, the Global Organization for Sustainable Development Goals, with no clear ties to the county — or anyplace else.
It gets worse: Dahiru A. Biu, the group’s CEO, applied for the grant using an address belonging to a county legislator.
Rrahh-rrahh-rahh-rahh! That’s the sound of the alarm triggered by this mess.
How did the grant, scuttled at the last minute by this newspaper’s reporting, get so far? How shoddy was the alleged vetting by Capital Market Advisors, the consultant hired by the county to administer the grant process?
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How many dodgy grants have already been, well, granted? And how do I get one?
Scratch that last question.
But, yes, an investigation is absolutely warranted. So, it’s good that, as my colleague Steve Hughes reported, Soares' office sent a subpoena to Capital Market Advisors requesting information on the grant process and related documents. That’s what district attorneys are supposed to do.
The thing is, Soares has never been especially eager to look under local political rocks. Although the district attorney did investigate 2019 allegations that public employees routinely and improperly performed campaign work for County Executive Dan McCoy, nothing came of it in the end.
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This new aggressiveness feels like a shift. It feels like payback, as if Soares is saying: You’re tarring me with a grant scandal? I’ll tar you with a grant scandal!
Certainly, Soares believes he was wronged, though he returned the $23,000 bonus he gave himself from state grant money. He called the issue a manufactured political hit and suggested McCoy is the puppeteer — an allegation the county executive’s spokesperson strongly denied.
“There’s a process, and we followed the process,” Mary Rozak told me last month.
That’s true, so far as I can tell. I think the bonuses are a legitimate issue and, as I have said, an egregious Soares mistake.
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But I wonder whether the process would have been followed had the district attorney been someone other than the outcast first elected in 2004.
In other words, if Soares was popular within the Democratic Party, if he wasn’t a critic of the Legislature’s bail reform, if he hadn’t given credence to those campaign allegations leveled against McCoy, here’s betting the county would have handled the bonus issue internally.
But because Soares is Soares, it wasn’t, which means the county did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Revenge can be righteous, under certain circumstances.
Maybe that’s also true of Soares' nascent investigation into that fishy grant, which presents the district attorney with an opportunity to drag McCoy’s administration — and county government more broadly — through the mud. It also gives Soares something new to talk about as he campaigns against challenger Lee Kindlon, who entered the Democratic primary after the bonus revelations.
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This could get messy, or messier, because once subpoenas start flying, you never know what they’ll hit. Duck!
The Soares-issued subpoena lands as the county’s legislature is considering whether to approve a $180,000 two-year extension for Capital Market Advisors, a move that should, at the very least, be tabled until the grant nearly given to the Global Organization for Sustainable Development Goals is fully investigated.
The Global Organization for Sustainable Development Goals?
A name so vague and full of buzzwords should have raised alarms on its own. The “organization” headed by Biu doesn’t have a website and doesn’t seem to be registered with the IRS, and yet somehow, in a county with significant poverty, homelessness and drug addiction problems, nearly received federal money designated for local nonprofits and charities harmed by the pandemic.
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Biu, meanwhile, was recently arrested in Pennsylvania on a 2017 warrant stemming from allegations that he never returned a rental car. He now seems to be residing in a county jail, a detail that presumably makes this embarrassing brouhaha all the more embarrassing.
Albany County, ladies and gentlemen. You couldn’t make this stuff up, even if you wanted to.
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