This story was originally published on March 6 by THE CITY. Sign up here to get the latest stories from THE CITY delivered to you each morning.
In 2019, a company called BusPatrol tried to sell the administration of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio on a system of school bus traffic enforcement cameras that would target scofflaw drivers who ignore the stop signs that swing out during pick-ups and drop-offs of children.
The city Department of Transportation wasn’t interested, at one point stating that the agency was “strongly” against the idea, insisting that existing speed cameras installed around the city are much more effective in promoting street safety.
BusPatrol’s quest appeared to be dead in the water. Then Eric Adams got elected mayor.
The company raised $30,000 for Adams’ inauguration at a late-2021 event attended by the soon-to-be-mayor. Adams heard their pitch and told them to reach out after he arrived at City Hall, according to two participants of the event.
Within months, BusPatrol had snagged multiple meetings with Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Philip Banks III. The company got crucial assistance from Banks’ chief of operations, Justin Meyers — who happened to be a longtime close friend of a BusPatrol executive named Stephen Randazzo.
Meyers attended these meetings between BusPatrol and Banks, one of which included Schools Chancellor David Banks — Phil’s brother. Meyers forwarded his friend Randazzo’s emails to Phil Banks, and included school bus cameras in a PowerPoint presentation he made to Banks and the mayor on the use of technology to improve public safety.
BusPatrol ultimately got into a pilot program Banks ordered set up to test out their cameras, boosting their chances of winning a big city contract that the Department of Transportation is now preparing to award. As for Meyers: immediately upon leaving City Hall he took a top-level job at BusPatrol that spiked his $211,000 city salary to between $350,000 and $400,000 annually, a source familiar with the matter told THE CITY.
This behind-the-scenes reversal of fortune with a little help from a friend played out in the Adams administration, under continued scrutiny for insiders using the power of their public office for personal gain.
Multiple top aides to the mayor have resigned in the course of investigations of possible corruption related to city contracts, municipal leases and campaign fundraising. That includes Banks brothers Philip and David, whose relationships with the mayor predate their time in City Hall.
Both brothers are subjects of a federal and city probe that involves a company called Saferwatch, which had unsuccessfully lobbied Phil and David to adopt an app for school safety. After the firm hired their younger brother Terence Banks, Phil Banks ordered up a test pilot program for the app in the public schools run by David, with plans to expand to a bigger contract.
All three Banks brothers had their phones confiscated by federal and city law enforcement in September, and Saferwatch received a subpoena. (Phil Banks’ attorney Benjamin Brafman has said he’s never been told his client is a target. Xavier Donaldson, attorney for David Banks, did not respond to THE CITY’s requests for comment). BusPatrol is not known to be part of that investigation.
City ethics rules prohibit public servants from using or attempting to use their position to “obtain any financial gain, contract, license, privilege or other private or personal advantage, direct or indirect” for themselves or for immediate family members or anyone with whom they have financial ties.
City Councilmember Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn), who chairs the Council’s Government Operations committee, said Meyers’ assistance of BusPatrol before he was offered a job by them appears to clash with that rule.
“This is the latest example of senior Adams administration officials who are focused on enriching themselves rather than delivering for New Yorkers,” Restler said. “What he has done appears to already be illegal…to accept a position with a firm that’s involved in a matter that you worked on when you were with the city.”
Meyers referred THE CITY’s questions to BusPatrol. Former Deputy Mayor Banks and Randazzo did not return THE CITY’s calls.
Close connections
BusPatrol’s journey from zero to hero at City Hall began in 2019, the year the state passed a law allowing local governments to put enforcement cameras in school buses.
Suffolk County embraced the company’s cameras right away, awarding BusPatrol its first major contract in New York. The company then turned to an even bigger market — New York City.
At first, it did not go well.
At a December 2019 City Council hearing, BusPatrol’s then-CEO, Jean Souliere, testified about the firm’s ability to catch scofflaws, arguing that their cameras would make the city safer. Then Monty Dean, chief of staff to the Department of Transportation’s chief operating officer, stepped up to the microphone, presenting a dramatically different viewpoint.
DOT “recommends strongly against” putting stop arm cameras on school buses, Dean said, adding, “Although passing a school bus with its stop arm engaged is illegal, there have been no deaths in New York City caused by this action nor is it a significant cause of serious injuries.”
Instead, Dean told the committee, DOT would continue to focus on improving traffic safety by increasing the number of speed cameras around the city, including near schools, noting, “Speeding is among the leading driver actions that kills and injures New Yorkers.” Data on deaths and injuries drives enforcement, Dean said, “whether identifying locations in need of safety enhancement or driver behaviors to target for enforcement.”
The company fared better once Adams was elected.
First BusPatrol hosted a December 2021 fundraiser for the soon-to-be mayor’s transition committee organized by the lobbyist firm Moonshot Strategies. BusPatrol officials made a presentation to Adams about their cameras, and Adams told the firm to reach out to City Hall once he took office, according to two participants who spoke to THE CITY on the condition of anonymity. The event raised $30,000, half of which the Adams transition committee returned to donors because the committee had maxed out on how much it could spend.
With Adams at City Hall, the connection between Randazzo and Meyers soon became crucial to the company’s sales effort.
The men had been close friends for more than a decade, with Meyers acting as a member of Randazzo’s wedding party. They both had recently left jobs in Suffolk County government: Randazzo for County Executive Steve Bellone, Meyers for District Attorney Tim Sini. During that time, Randazzo helped clinch the county’s decision to ink a major contract with BusPatrol, which generated $45 million in revenue for the firm in 2022 and 2023 combined. (BusPatrol collects a percentage of each violation.)
Randazzo left his job as Assistant Deputy Suffolk County Executive in February 2022 and went to work for BusPatrol. Meyers quit his job with the DA in November 2021, coinciding with Sini’s defeat in a reelection bid, and started as Banks’ chief of staff in mid-January 2022.
Sini is now in private practice, where his clients include BusPatrol. Sini also represents Terence Banks in the ongoing federal and city probes over his City Hall dealings with his brothers David and Philip. He declined repeated requests for comment.
Conflicting timelines
BusPatrol’s first interaction with City Hall was arranged by Moonshot Strategies. The company made their case on March 22, 2022, via Zoom to Philip and David Banks, according to Philip Banks’ official schedule.
A BusPatrol spokesperson said Meyers didn’t reveal his ties to Randazzo until more than a year later, when he learned Banks was interested in putting cameras in buses, but a participant in that initial meeting said Banks knew about the relationship from the start.
During that Zoom session, BusPatrol officials happened to mention that their cameras were operating in Suffolk County school buses, according to a participant. Deputy Mayor Banks, aware of Meyers’ prior job, directed Meyers to join the Zoom call, which he did, informing everyone in the virtual meeting — including his boss — how he’d known Randazzo for years, the participant said.
Soon Randazzo replaced Moonshot as BusPatrol’s lobbyist, listing himself as BusPatrol’s “executive vice president Government Relations and Customer Experience” and describing his lobbying mission as “discussion regarding the capabilities of BusPatrol technology” with the city.
A second meeting between BusPatrol and Philip Banks took place that July, this time in person. Meyers and Randazzo attended. A third meeting appearing on Banks’ schedule, held Aug. 2, 2022, listed “School Bus Patrol Safety” and noted Meyers’ participation.
BusPatrol claims Banks didn’t inform him that he was behind trying out the cameras until much later, but a participant in that August 2022 meeting said that while Banks didn’t signal his support for BusPatrol per se, he did state that he was all in for putting security cameras on city school buses.
As BusPatrol sought to win City Hall’s favor, Meyers periodically forwarded Randazzo’s emails providing details on how the camera system worked to Banks, a BusPatrol spokesperson confirmed.
Meyers then gave BusPatrol another potential boost of support during a February 2023 presentation on the use of technology to improve public safety that he made to Banks and the mayor.
The presentation, according to BusPatrol officials, included a PowerPoint recommending the use of many tech devices, including drones and license plate readers. Meyers specifically noted that cameras in school buses could be used to observe surrounding traffic to provide a “real time” view of New York via the city’s 9,000 school bus routes across the five boroughs.
At the time Meyers made this presentation, Deputy Mayor Banks had already voiced support for the city trying out a stop-arm camera program and his official schedule shows he appears to have met with only one company that could operate such a program: BusPatrol.
Contending that Meyers didn’t learn of Deputy Mayor Banks’ interest in putting cameras in buses until around March 2023, BusPatrol spokesperson, Tony Sclafani, said that at that point, Meyers disclosed the full extent of his relationship with BusPatrol employees to Banks, the mayor’s general counsel and the city Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB).
In a March 6, 2023, email reviewed by THE CITY, Meyers told the mayor’s general counsel that Randazzo was a “very close friend of 10 years” and that he had been a member of Randazzo’s wedding party. He also revealed Jason Elan, head of external affairs at BusPatrol, was also a “very close friend for 10 years,” while Souliere — who by then was no longer BusPatrol’s CEO — had been a friend of his for two years.
“When Justin was made aware that City Hall was interested in exploring Stop Arm Enforcement, Justin immediately disclosed his relationships with BusPatrol employees to COIB and the general counsel’s office, seeking guidance from both. Justin followed the guidance and went above and beyond the recommended restrictions, holding himself to the highest level of integrity during his brief tenure in New York City,” Sclafani said. (Meyers worked at City Hall for more than 20 months).
In the email, Meyers wrote that the general counsel’s lawyers “have advised me” to inform agencies overseeing the stop-arm program — the Department of Education and Department of Transportation — about his close relationship with BusPatrol employees, and that going forward he should not answer agency questions about the technology. The BusPatrol spokesperson told THE CITY Meyers followed this advice.
Around April 2023 Randazzo asked Meyers if he was considering taking a private sector job, the BusPatrol spokesperson said. While the spokesperson said Randazzo did not explicitly invite him to apply to the firm, by that June Meyers had landed a job interview with BusPatrol’s CEO.
In mid-July 2023, BusPatrol offered Meyers a top-level executive position as Chief Innovation Officer with the much higher salary. At that point, they say, Meyers met with Bill Heinzen, the mayor’s special counsel, seeking advice. Five days later, Meyers emailed Rahul Agarwal, then the mayor’s deputy chief counsel, revealing that he’d accepted a job with BusPatrol.
City employees are prohibited from negotiating for any position with any firm that’s involved in a particular matter with the city “while the employee is actively considering, or is directly concerned or personally participating in such a particular matter on behalf of the city.”
A spokesperson for BusPatrol told THE CITY Meyers didn’t break that rule because, they say, he didn’t begin job discussions with BusPatrol until after he was no longer assisting them in their interactions with City Hall. The spokesperson also emphasized Meyers was never involved in the implementation of the pilot program.
After he accepted the BusPatrol job but while still working for the city, Meyers promised to recuse himself from any discussion about BusPatrol or about the stop-arm camera industry in general. He wrote in a July 2023 email reviewed by THE CITY that since his initial memo to the counsel in March 2023, he had not discussed BusPatrol with any city employee or participated in any meetings related to the company. He promised to do the same going forward.
Meyers, however, appears to have had at least one meeting with a top member of Adams’ team, after he left City Hall and began working for BusPatrol: Schools Chancellor David Banks. Banks official schedule lists a Nov. 28, 2023 meeting with Meyers — two months after Meyers had started his new job at BusPatrol.
City ethics rules bar former public servants from appearing before the city “in relation to any particular matter” involving the same party “with respect to which particular matter the public servant…had participated personally and substantially as a public servant through decision, approval, recommendation, investigation or other similar activities.”
David Banks’ attorney, Donaldson, referred THE CITY’s questions about this meeting to the Department of Education. The DOE did not respond to THE CITY’s questions about it, and BusPatrol declined to comment on it.
By then the Department of Transportation had launched the pilot program, assigning the task to a nonprofit, New York City School Bus Umbrella Services, that operates 800 school buses. Officials at the nonprofit say they contacted multiple companies that specialize in security services, but only two responded — Verra Mobility, which already had a DOT contract to operate the city’s stop light cameras, and BusPatrol. BusPatrol’s cameras were then placed on 30 buses. NYCSSBUS’ point of contact with BusPatrol was Randazzo.
‘Potential to expand’
Former Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison told THE CITY that he was aware of the county’s adoption of the school bus camera system when he ran the department and saw both a good and bad side to it.
The existence of the cameras could dissuade drivers from passing stopped school buses, and the cameras could assist detectives in investigations such as by capturing images of subjects fleeing the scene of a crime, Harrison said. But Harrison, a former top-level NYPD chief who’s now an executive at a private security firm, also noted the cameras could potentially have a disproportionate impact on Black and brown communities that rely more heavily on school buses.
Harrison also raised concerns about the way a BusPatrol executive and a top mayoral aide who were longtime friends worked together as the firm sought to win backing to place its cameras in New York City school buses.
“Is this something where they are looking to protect children that are traveling back and forth to school or is this an attempt by an administration to try to make some monetary gain out of this whole thing?” he said. “That’s what needs to be looked at — if it’s for the right reasons and making sure it’s not some connections to make some backdoor business deals, then it’s good for the city.”
In September the push to put stop-arm cameras in school buses moved from the pilot stage to the contract stage when DOT — abandoning its prior objections — issued a public notice requesting proposals to put the devices on 250 buses, with “potential to expand in the future.” Fines are currently set at $250 for the first violation and up to $300 for each repeat incident.
The BusPatrol spokesperson said Meyers had nothing to do with the drafting of the request for proposals.
Unlike Suffolk County, New York City does not do revenue sharing for traffic enforcement and is preparing to pay the winning vendor outright.
The BusPatrol spokesperson would not say if the firm put in a bid, but its representatives attended a Sept. 18 pre-proposal session with DOT, records show.
The solicitation ended in December. The Department of Transportation has yet to announce which contractor it will select.
