Newsday

April 30, 2001

NEXT-DOOR DESIGNS - Architect with ties to Pataki wins Old Westbury contracts

A small architecture firm whose owner has close personal ties to Gov. George Pataki has been awarded more than $800,000 in SUNY Old Westbury and other state contracts by officials who passed over many competitors with stronger credentials. Architect James M. Copeland, a relative by marriage and next-door neighbor of the governor, has been chosen for state contracts over competing firms that were larger, closer to the job sites and much more experienced than Copeland's firm, records show.

Copeland said he sought state work unsuccessfully before Pataki became governor in 1995. But since then he has won eight state jobs -- four at Old Westbury, two at the SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx, one from the state's parks agency and one from a state parks commission.

Copeland's firm, Hudson Design, got a share in one Old Westbury project because college officials urged a much larger Manhattan architecture firm competing for the contract to take on Copeland's firm as a partner, officials acknowledged.

In other contract-award proceedings, Copeland benefited from state officials' subjective awards of points that boosted his competitive ranking. When seeking a contract involving a proposed Nassau police academy on the Old Westbury campus, for example, Copeland, who had never designed a police facility, received the same points for "similar projects” as firms that had designed such facilities. Officials said Copeland was equally qualified because the contract involved only a preliminary study.

For another contract, he got points for being a minority contractor, which he isn't. State officials acknowledged that that was a mistake.

Copeland is among those with connections to the governor who have benefited from plans for extensive land development at the Old Westbury campus. Newsday reported yesterday that those plans, while they stand to benefit a small circle of politically connected people, have done nothing to benefit the troubled school. As with the stories of others involved in the sometimes secretive decision-making that has surrounded the development plan, the story of Copeland's state contracts is one that raises questions about insider access and the influence of private relationships on public decisions and spending.

It is also a story with a touch of mystery in its plot -- namely, did somebody in state government fabricate a document to put one of Copeland's contract awards in a better light?

The State University Construction Fund released records to Newsday suggesting that the agency approved Copeland for the police academy contract and put him to work a month before officials conducted the competitive selection process required by law.

In defending that contract award, officials gave Newsday a photocopy of a memo they said showed they had actually conducted an earlier selection process and, therefore, complied with the law.

Three forensic documents experts who examined that memo for Newsday, however, described it as an apparent fabrication. One of them, Jeffrey Luber of the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory, said the memo "appears to be a composite document... a ‘cut and paste' ” with "a non-genuine signature.”

In a five-page letter to Newsday on Friday, the construction fund's general manager, Michael Clemente, defended the agency's choice of Copeland. He said some officials recalled a selection process taking place before Hudson Design got the contract. But Clemente acknowledged that despite extensive efforts, the agency could find no other records to support those recollections. He said the selection committee members could not verify that the meeting described in the questioned memo actually took place. Clemente did not vouch for the authenticity of the memo.

One of Copeland's brothers is married to a sister of Libby Pataki, the governor's wife. Copeland and his family live next door to the Patakis in Garrison, N.Y., about 40 miles north of the Throgs Neck Bridge. Copeland said that he and his wife are friends with the Patakis. But the relationship "has absolutely nothing to do with my work,” he said. Copeland said he never discusses state contracts with the governor. "I don't talk to George about things like this,” he said. "It would be the height of impropriety. It would be an incredibly insensitive thing for me to do to a relation. I value my friendship, and I would not do that.”

A spokesman for Pataki said, "the bottom line is that decisions regarding the awarding of contracts are made by career professionals at the various agencies.”

Police Academy Contract
State records released to Newsday by SUNY do not show any problems with Copeland's work as an architect, but they do raise questions about how he was chosen for the police academy contract. State law requires officials to conduct a competitive selection process before awarding any architecture contract over $25,000. Under the Freedom of Information Law, Newsday requested the records on how the construction fund chose the architect for that $102,100 contract.

The records released by the fund showed that although SUNY officials were referring to Copeland in internal documents in December 1998, as the winner of the contract, the selection committee did not meet to conduct the required evaluation of the competing firms until Jan. 25, 1999.

Prior to that meeting, a senior fund official who played a central role in the selection process was quoted in an internal agency e-mail as saying, "we want to select Hudson Design.” The committee then gave Hudson the highest score, and the contract was awarded -- retroactive to Dec. 1, 1998.

When Newsday asked about that sequence of events, fund officials gave the newspaper a photocopy of a memo dated Nov. 25, 1998, which had not been included in the earlier batch of released records. That memo said the selection committee had first met on Nov. 18, 1998, and chose Copeland on that date.

After studying that memo at Newsday's request, the three documents experts independently said in written reports that the memo appeared to be a fabrication, evidently pieced together on a photocopying machine. Michael G. Kessler, a certified fraud examiner and owner of a private detective agency wrote, "Based upon our experience and expertise we highly suspect that the November 25, 1998 document is a forgery... ”

In interviews over the past several weeks, several fund officials told Newsday that a November 1998, meeting took place. They included Clemente; Frank Breselor, the agency's legal counsel; and David Henahan, SUNY public relations officer. In his letter on Friday, however, Clemente said: "Unfortunately, we cannot prove with documents that it did.”

Both selection memos have identical versions of the signature of Kenneth Schweigard, fund comptroller. Schweigard said he remembered signing two such memos. Clemente said the file that would have included original copies of the memos had been thrown away. "I wish we had kept that file, but we didn't,” Clemente said.

Family Ties
Copeland started Hudson Design in 1986 and practiced in Manhattan before moving to Putnam County in the early 1990s. In 1993, the Copelands bought a house next door to the Patakis, a large, yellow Victorian with a wraparound porch and a barn for their two horses. The Patakis' mansion, also a Victorian, sits on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The Copelands' house has a less dramatic setting, facing a local highway. Hudson Design, where Copeland works with a staff of six, occupies a small, one-story house a few miles away. Copeland is the only licensed architect in the firm.

Both Copelands have been active in local politics. James Copeland became a Republican committeeman, and Carolyn Rossi Copeland has served on the school board. The Copelands and the Patakis attend the same church and sometimes go out to dinner together, local residents said.

Copeland has told state officials that his family and the Patakis are close, one official said. The conversation took place in 1999 when Copeland met with John Saxton, regional director for the State University Construction Fund, and Susan DeSimone, another senior fund official, Saxton said.

Saxton, who has since retired, said Carolyn Copeland "had extended a courtesy to the governor's family in a private way... He intimated that there was a mutual respect for each other over personal family things.” Copeland declined to discuss his family's relationship with the Patakis. "I think my wife and the governor's family deserve some privacy,” he said.

Saxton said nobody ever told him to favor Copeland. "Nobody came down and said, ‘You're going to hire Jamie Copeland,'” Saxton said. "No -- absolutely not.”

State Contracts
In awarding some contracts to Copeland, records show, senior state officials concluded that his firm, Hudson Design, was more qualified than firms that had dozens of architects, had won many architectural awards and had designed and overseen construction of projects of far greater size and complexity than any done by Hudson.

Hudson got its first state contract in 1997 from the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Officials concluded that Copeland's firm was more qualified than 40 other architecture and engineering firms from across the state. The contract was for several jobs in state parks along the Hudson River.

The competitors, small and large, included heavyweights such as Einhorn Yaffee Prescott, with a staff of 650 in eight cities, including Albany, and 19 professional awards during the past four years. Hudson Design's Web site (www.hudsondesignonline.com) lists several successful remodeling and historic-preservation projects but no professional awards and no large buildings that actually have been erected.

State law says architects should be chosen for government contracts in a competitive process "on the basis of demonstrated competence and qualification.” The law gives officials considerable latitude to use their judgement on how to achieve that. Typically an agency advertises its upcoming jobs, and firms submit their qualifications. A committee of agency officials studies the submissions and sends a recommendation -- either a single winner or a so-called "short list” of top candidates -- to one of the agency's top officials, who makes the final selection.

The state parks agency committee narrowed the list to Hudson and two other small firms. In a "blind vote,” committee members unanimously chose Hudson as "the most highly qualified,” according to the committee's report, which did not give reasons for the decision. Hudson was paid $292,539 under the contract for work that included designing the conversion of part of an historic bathhouse at the Saratoga Spa State Park to judges' chambers.

Old Westbury Work
The following year Copeland became part of a small group of insiders who were quietly working on a plan to develop some of Long Island's most valuable remaining vacant land -- about 200 acres at the SUNY campus in Old Westbury.

Without the knowledge of the college's then-interim president, W. Hubert Keen, a plan for extensive land development at the campus was being shaped in mid-1998 by the governor's top appointee at the school, William Howell, chairman of the college council, and a close associate, T. Robinson Ahlstrom, then the college's development director.

Their ambitious plans for a commercially oriented sports complex, a horseback-riding facility, dormitories, faculty houses, a new Nassau police academy, a day-care center, an artificial lake and other construction could have meant hundreds of millions of dollars in business for the developers, engineers and architects chosen for the jobs.

Several months before the scope of the plan became publicly known, Copeland was hired for $15,000 to produce an initial study and sketches for the radical changes to the campus. Albert Smith, the college's vice president for administration, said Copeland was paid with money from the private foundation affiliated with the college. The college then reimbursed the foundation from state funds, Smith said.

Copeland said he got the job not through his connections with the governor but because he and Ahlstrom knew each other as members of the New York Fellowship, a religious and charitable group. "It was your usual networking,” Copeland said.

On July 14, 1998, Keen, an academic administrator not involved in politics, walked into a meeting and was astounded, he told Newsday in 1999, when Howell and Ahlstrom showed him Copeland's drawings for extensive development on campus, a plan he'd been told nothing about. At the meeting were two men he'd never met: Copeland and Fred DeMatteis, a major real estate developer.

Picking a Winner
In September 1998, the State University Construction Fund advertised for proposals from architects for a preliminary study for a building planned at the Old Westbury campus for Nassau's police academy and some college programs.

For architects, it was an attractive opportunity. The study would pay about $100,000 and, more important, could give the architect an inside track toward winning the contract for designing the building, which could mean a fee of more than $900,000. Hudson and 10 other firms sent in applications detailing their credentials.

Again, Hudson appeared to be an underdog entry. The competing firms were larger. One of them claimed more than 100 awards and citations. Several had done previous SUNY projects, which was one of the selection criteria; Hudson had not. Several had designed police facilities; Hudson had not.

The SUNY agency's guidelines say that a selection committee should competitively rank the qualifications of firms seeking contracts, giving each a numerical score. The committee, made up of three agency officials, passes on its ratings to the fund's general manager, who makes the final decision.

Construction fund records raise questions about the agency's actions in choosing Copeland's firm. According to those records, Saxton, the official mentioned in an internal e-mail as saying "we want to select Hudson Design,” played a key role.

In a procedure not discussed in the guidelines, Saxton conducted a preliminary screening of the 11 firms, producing a "short list” of six finalists and giving Hudson the highest score. He gave Hudson more points for "staffing” and State University Construction Fund "work capacity” than the other five, although all had larger staffs. He gave Hudson the same points for "similar projects” as three firms that had previously designed police buildings.

When the committee met, the three committee members did not fill out individual rating sheets reflecting their own evaluations of the firms' merits. Instead, each member handed in the rating sheet prepared by Saxton and initialed a cover sheet to show that they concurred with his scores. In other contract awards examined by Newsday, committee members prepared their own rating sheets, and the points were combined to determine the highest score.

Saxton told Newsday he didn't recall the details of Copeland's selection. He said that although the records seemed to show an unusual procedure, he was sure that nothing improper was done. "It sounds like something's wrong, but I have no recollection of it, and it sounds completely out of the ordinary,” Saxton said. "We don't do that. I don't think we do that. Maybe we did that. I don't think so... Believe me, there was never any collusion in selecting the consultants at that office. No, no, no.”

Fund officials said the agency routinely assigns senior officials to narrow the fields of applicants before selection committees make their decisions, although the guidelines do not mention such a procedure. They said a small firm can do a preliminary study as well as a large firm.

"You do not want to match up a small contract with a major firm and get lost in the shuffle,” said James Biggane, an assistant manager at the fund.

Records show that Clemente, the construction fund's top official, withdrew himself from approving the contract award to Copeland. Clemente said he assigned Schweigard, the agency's comptroller, to make the final decision and sign the selection memo.

Breselor said Clemente stepped aside "because there was this gossip that Hudson was in some way politically connected. He felt that, because of that, he ought not to participate.” Clemente was Pataki's deputy director of state operations before the governor appointed him to his current $174,900-a-year SUNY post.

Interviewed later, however, Clemente said he knew nothing about any connections between Copeland and the governor. Clemente said he withdrew because of an earlier meeting he had had with Copeland. In 1997, at a time when Copeland was seeking state work, Clemente and Biggane met with Copeland at Hudson Design's office in Garrison, Clemente said. Clemente said he routinely meets with hundreds of architects seeking state work. "We have an open-door policy,” he said.

To avoid "any appearance of a conflict,” Clemente said, he then assigns the final decision to other officials. SUNY spokesman Henahan said Hudson was "treated as all small firms are.” Saxton said small firms sometimes do get such interviews. "It helps if you know somebody,” he said. "If you're just from Podunk, you're not going to end up with a meeting with Mike Clemente.”

A Questioned Document
Clemente, Breselor and other fund officials said in an interview that the November 1998 selection meeting described in the questioned document did actually take place. They said the Jan. 25, 1999, meeting was, essentially, a do-over.

After the November meeting, they said, the agency decided to reduce Copeland's fee from $127,700 to $102,100. The agency held the January meeting to approve the award of a contract at the lower amount, although such an action wasn't required by law, Breselor said.

But fund documents raise other questions. The material released to Newsday included several internal procedural documents generated in connection with the Jan. 25 meeting. There were no such documents for a Nov. 18 meeting. In addition, the records released by the fund appear to contradict the officials' account on another point. The records describe the agency as deciding to increase Copeland's fee from $58,790 to $102,100, not to reduce it.

Clemente said that no other records supporting the officials' recollections could be located. The entire file on the Nov. 18 selection process was thrown away, he said. A "relatively exhaustive” search had produced no other copies, he said.

The documents experts noted that Schweigard's signature on the memo describing a Nov. 18 meeting is an exact match to the signature on the memo describing the Jan. 25 meeting. Document examiner Connie Brinker of California concluded that "the signature is a lifted signature,” transferred by photocopying or the use of a transparency. "Either method will give you an exact copy of the signature,” she wrote, adding that nobody can sign his or her name exactly the same way twice.

The Suffolk crime lab's Luber, a forensic document examiner who analyzed the memo for Newsday in his private practice, said that he found two styles of type at different points in the memo and that someone apparently altered one area with an opaque liquid such as Wite-Out.

Kessler, who runs a private investigations agency based in Manhattan, said "it appears that through various alterations, erasures and photocopier manipulation the February 3, 1999 document was used as a basis to generate the November 25, 1998 document.”

State law prohibits altering public records or creating phony ones. The forgery statute says anyone who "falsely makes, completes or alters ... a public record” is guilty of second-degree forgery, a felony, if they do it to deceive someone.

Clemente, in his letter to Newsday, said that "Whether or not there were errors or failures to comply strictly with Fund procedures in this selection process, I know personally that no illegal or improper benefit went to Hudson Design ... I did not, in any way, influence this selection process.”

More Contracts
The architecture firm of Gruzen Samton, founded in 1936, occupies two stories in a Manhattan skyscraper overlooking the Hudson River. With a staff of about 150, the firm says it has won more than 100 awards and designed structures in 34 states. One of its specialties is designing college buildings and campus master plans.

When Gruzen Samton became a front-runner for a contract in 1999 to create a master development plan for the Old Westbury campus, however, college officials decided that the Gruzen firm should share the work with a partner -- Hudson Design. After Gruzen agreed to the arrangement, Hudson wound up with about a 40 percent share in the contract, Copeland said. That would be about $82,781 of the $206,953 the state has spent on the effort so far.

Scott Keller, a Gruzen partner, said: "We were, in effect, asked during our interview whether we would consider adding other consultants to our team, And we said, ‘Well, yeah, we've done that before'... The college asked if we'd join together, and we did.”

The minutes of a faculty meeting say that a Pataki appointee to the college's council, Joseph Kearney, who is vice chairman of the Nassau Republican organization, pushed for Hudson to work with Gruzen. The minutes quote Dr. Maureen Dolan, a professor who serves on a campus development committee, as saying Kearney argued that the "corporate teams [for the contract] should be broken up and reconfigured, which has never been the process before, and that is how Hudson Design was combined with Gruzen Samton. There was no public process in the selection of Hudson Design.”

Kearney said in an interview that "we wanted to put them both together” because each firm brought its own expertise for the job. "I don't know if it was my idea alone, but I certainly supported it,” Kearney said. He said he hadn't known anything about Copeland's ties to the Pataki family.

Hudson also got $51,685 in state funds from two 1999 contracts at the SUNY Maritime College at Fort Schuyler, under the Throgs Neck Bridge. The contracts were for overseeing the repair of tennis courts and campus housing.

Officials of the two firms that lost out to Hudson said they had written several letters to the construction fund during the past few years about their interest in doing state work. Nobody ever replied, they said, until the day after Newsday asked fund officials if the two firms had ever been interviewed. That day, the fund contacted both companies to schedule interviews.

Last year, Old Westbury's president, the Rev. Calvin Butts, hired Copeland to oversee a renovation of his suite of offices at the college. "He had seen some of our work and asked us if we could help him do that,” Copeland said. Hudson was paid $19,158.

In January, the state dropped its plans for a police academy building at Old Westbury. A few days later, Pataki and State Parks Commissioner Bernadette Castro held a press conference to unveil another state project that had been awarded to Copeland – a design for a 10,000-square-foot visitors center in the Sterling Forest State Park in Rockland County.

Carol Ash, executive director of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, which is overseeing the project, said the $247,000 contract went to Copeland after a competition of "probably 10 to 15 firms.” State officials refused to show Newsday any records involving the contract and have not acted on a Freedom of Information request filed on Jan. 25.

Ash said five finalists were interviewed, "and Jamie was far and away the best in terms of both design and being able to articulate how he viewed the gestalt of the visitors center... We have been very happy with Jamie.”

Copeland said a childhood experience taught him never to become involved in anything improper. "I was arrested for shoplifting when I was 11 years old and I was taken in, and I was booked in Charlotte, North Carolina,” he said. "And it had a profound effect on me, and I thank that police officer. He made a big deal out of it for a good reason, and I owe him a debt of thanks. It was a lesson for a young man to know the difference between right and wrong, and I took the lesson seriously.”