May 8, 2025
Nicole Rosenthal
May 7, 2025
His hiring prospects became a total tramwreck!
One of the executives who paid to plant stories blaming tourists for Roosevelt Island’s notoriously mismanaged Tramway insists he did it because scores of bad press made finding people willing to work for him nearly impossible, he said through a lawyer.
Shelton Haynes of the Roosevelt Island Operating Commission — one of three execs who paid a PR firm nearly $170,000 in taxpayer cash to manipulate local media outlets and plant web posts — said the group’s bad online reputation was a major recruitment headache.
“Because of the overwhelming negative press, which was devastating to the morale of the other employees of RIOC, it made it hard to recruit talent to work at RIOC,” Haynes whined through his attorney, Milt Williams.
“The reputation… it was really viewed in poor stead,” said Williams, a partner at Walden Macht Harran & Williams.
The group forked over big bucks to hire the PR firm Status Labs to game Google-search algorithms because press slamming the tram’s poor service had been relentless, he said.
“It was inundation: That’s why they went to Status Labs, they were desperate,” said Williams.
Last month, a state report found that Haynes and three other well-paid ROIC executives paid to plant posts online claiming a swarm of tourist were behind tram mishaps.
But it was actually ROIC mismanagement, faulty equipment and lackluster service that were largely to blame for problems with the popular 59th Street tram over the East River, the state Office of the Inspector General said in the report.
In an interview with The Post, Williams defended Haynes by insisting that roughly $76 million in improvements to Roosevelt Island were made under his leadership — including renovating the Sportspark Complex and completing the tram elevator project.
Local newspapers and other outlets had for years bashed the RIOC, with The Roosevelt Island Daily News closely reporting on tram problems and poor management— tagging 419 articles on its website under “RIOC negligence.”
An anonymous letter from RIOC employees published on opnlttr.com in March 2022 also claimed execs had “a long history of corruption, ethics scandals and a culture of harassment, bullying, and favoritism due to pandering.”
Williams said the governor’s office blocked the decision to hire Status Labs when execs first brought it up and contended the contract was below the $175,000, threshold to necessitate approval from RIOC’s board of directors.
The firm entered into a one-year contract with RIOC in October 2022 and planted 17 positive articles about top RIOC executives on various blogs, all while pushing scathing local articles lower on Google search, according to the Inspector General’s report.
Another rep for Haynes, consultant Frank De Maria of Purposeful Advisors – a firm which “helps organizations shape their narrative,” according to its website – claimed the search optimization tactics were about “striking a balance.”
“You’re bringing the negative stuff down, the positive stuff up… it’s not misleading to do that,” De Maria said. “It’s important for the positive message to come out. It seemed overly negative, which would require you to hire someone to help you redress the balance.”
The inspector general’s office said that Status Labs’ Google search flooding was a “stark contrast to the state’s public policy goals of transparent government.”
On April 3, the state released a report that found the PR firm was paid to bury bad press about the tram and “publish articles on platforms designed specifically to host content meant to game [Google] search algorithms.”
“If a user’s content does not appear ‘on the first few pages of results,’ that content ‘may as well not exist,’” the April 3 report said, quoting Google’s search engine optimization starter guide. Status Labs says its mission is “to help our clients take and maintain control of their digital identity and look their best online,” according to its website.
In 2023, Haynes and fellow former exec Gretchen Robinson sued RIOC and the governor’s office, citing workplace discrimination and retaliation.
Both employees are black, and alleged they experienced racist discrimination while working at RIOC – including Haynes being at the center of roughly a dozen “unwarranted” inspector general investigations “based entirely on specious allegations of wrongdoing” before he and Robinson left RIOC last year, according to court documents.
A state ethics commission is reviewing the inspector general’s report for further action, including a determination regarding whether executive staff may have violated New York state’s Public Officers Law Code of Ethics.
But Williams claims Haynes and Robinson were never notified about the investigation before the inspector general’s report in the first place, and were “never given an opportunity” to respond to the probe.
“Neither of them have jobs now. For those that don’t know them, they’re basically pariahs,” Williams added. “It’s been a devastating impact on them in terms of their careers, and in terms of their emotional well-being.”