Top Aide to Cuomo Rebukes State Worker Who Talked to the Press

In the interview, Mr. Fayette praised Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the transportation workers who had labored to repair roads and bridges washed out by Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. No matter. His supervisors said he had not been authorized to speak to the press, and they moved to fire him; he retired instead and left in February.

The story might have ended there — strange but small — but for the Cuomo administration’s reaction to an article about it that appeared on Wednesday in The Daily Enterprise.

On Thursday, livid that an engineer in the Adirondacks was being portrayed as a victim of Mr. Cuomo’s penchant for control, a top aide to the governor, Howard B. Glaser, took to the airwaves. He read aloud Mr. Fayette’s disciplinary history, describing him as a troubled employee who had previously been penalized for having an improper relationship with a subordinate, misusing his work e-mail to send sexually explicit messages and using his state-assigned vehicle for personal errands.

“It is not the policy of this administration to terminate people solely for improper contact with the press,” said Mr. Glaser, the director of state operations, adding, “If that were the issue here, the only issue, there would not have been a termination.”

Mr. Fayette, who had worked for the state for 29 years, was stunned. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” he said Thursday. “The governor needs to say, ‘Hey, look, guys, you’re embarrassing me, you’re embarrassing the state, you’re going after this guy like he’s freaking killed somebody.’ ”

Mr. Fayette said he believed that Mr. Glaser had broken the law by disclosing his record.

“If anything, someone should be investigating that clown,” Mr. Fayette said. “You can’t do that. That is so over the line it’s not funny.”

He added, “He’s just daring me to hire an attorney and sue him.”

Mr. Glaser said all of the information he disclosed on WGDJ-AM, in Albany, had come from a document that was a public record.

“Some in the press were breathless to fit this incident into a favored narrative about Cuomo administration control of information,” Mr. Glaser wrote in an e-mail. “But the facts turn out to be inconvenient to that tired story line. If reporters had taken the time to get the whole story, a much different picture would have emerged of a quirky but basically routine personnel matter.”

The case began in August, when a reporter at the newspaper, writing a series of articles on the first anniversary of Tropical Storm Irene, asked to speak to Transportation Department workers.

A spokeswoman for the department did not respond, according to the newspaper, so the reporter called Mr. Fayette, who is the agency’s resident engineer in Essex County.

Mr. Fayette, 55, who grew up on a farm near the Canadian border, had worked for the department since college graduation. He agreed to an interview, saying he feared the newspaper would otherwise accuse the department of “blowing off” its request. The resulting article, which was published on Aug. 30 with the headline “D.O.T. Engineer on Irene: ‘We Were Up for It,’ ” suggested that the department had worked valiantly after the storm.

Six days later, Mr. Fayette received a letter ordering him to attend a “disciplinary interrogation” in Albany, which he said he later found out was a result of the interview he had granted. He was soon told that the state would seek to fire him; after lining up witnesses, including local elected officials, to vouch for him at a hearing, he decided to retire instead.

Cuomo administration officials said no one in the governor’s office had known about Mr. Fayette’s case until it was reported in the paper.

As for the Transportation Department, whose silence in response to an inquiry from a reporter set off the chain of events? Its communications office did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/nyregion/top-aide-to-cuomo-rebukes-state-worker-who-talked-to-the-press.html?partner=rss&emc=rss