Mamdani Says Top City Lawyer Is Probing DCAS Off-Grid Chats

Mayor Zohran Mamdani says the city’s top lawyer is personally digging into allegations that senior officials at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, the agency that handles city purchasing and property, routinely used personal email and text messages to talk official business.

The allegations were first reported by The City Reporter. City employees are required to conduct official business through official channels so those discussions are preserved and can be released to the public.

The claims come from Michelle Gundy, a DCAS whistleblower who made them in a lawsuit and in conversations with The City Reporter. According to Gundy, her supervisors spent the past year keeping sensitive subjects off the books by using personal email, texts and even hand-delivered documents. Those subjects, she alleges, included nepotism and an unusual lease request. She says she was fired in May after raising questions about the practice and other agency issues. These are her allegations; the outlet’s reporting presents them as claims.

In one example Gundy cited, a top official told her to write a memo about a nepotistic hire and hand deliver it directly rather than send it through her work phone or email. She also alleges she was told to discuss certain topics over her personal phone and email. Other topics she says were kept offline: how a probation commissioner under the Eric Adams administration pushed DCAS to move her Manhattan-based agency to a building in Long Island City because it was near her home, and how to fix a flaw in the agency’s protocol for testing cooling towers for Legionella, the potentially deadly bacteria.

Asked about it Wednesday, Mamdani told The City Reporter that Corporation Counsel Steven Banks is “himself taking a direct look at it.” The mayor said any indication of a departure from city practice or from full compliance with the law is something the administration takes “incredibly seriously,” and he stressed the importance of both following the law and making sure city records exist.

On Oct. 8, Banks sent DCAS a letter advising the department to tell staff not to delete any texts or emails where city business was discussed. Officials described it as a pro-forma notice the Law Department sends in response to lawsuits. The notice went out months after Gundy filed suit, and a week after The City Reporter sent DCAS a list of questions about her claims.

Late Thursday, DCAS spokesperson Anessa Hodgson said the agency issued instructions and required next steps to relevant employees to preserve records, as is standard practice with legal action and in line with the Law Department’s instructions. Last weekend, the DCAS general counsel emailed staff named in the lawsuit and in The City Reporter’s Oct. 14 story, telling them to preserve personal texts and emails.

The DCAS questions follow earlier reporting about a top Mamdani aide coordinating City Hall messaging with so-called influencers over the encrypted app Signal. In at least one case, those messages were set to auto-delete, meaning they could not be retained as legally required. The mayor’s general counsel said he immediately told staff not to use Signal for city business, and the chief of staff sent a reminder to use city phones and email for official matters.

The Department of Investigation, the city’s independent anti-corruption watchdog, has said it is aware of the allegations about off-site communications. On Thursday, DOI spokesperson Diane Struzzi declined to comment on the do-not-delete instructions sent to DCAS staff.