GOSHEN – Employment changes are coming for two key figures in the Orange County IT contract controversy, Director of Operations Alicia D’Amico and Commissioner of General Services Samantha Sweikata.
D’Amico will retire at the end of the month and Sweikata will be reassigned to a position working in the county’s economic development office, according to County Executive Steve Neuhaus.
The county executive, speaking to Mid-Hudson News via telephone while on military assignment in Spain on Tuesday, said the changes had nothing to do with the IT scandal in which the two women provided conflicting accounts of the vendor selection given to a special legislative committee.
“I think it’s just the fact of me making a command decision and readjusting how the county should be run, and I’m going to be making a number of other changes over the next couple of months as well,” he said.
Neuhaus said in addition to D’Amico’s retirement at the end of the month, Sweikata will be assigned to work under Economic Development Director Steve Gross.
She will be networking between business prospects and municipalities, he said.
D’Amico and Sweikata were central in a recently released report by a special task force convened to investigate the county’s IT contracts. The legislature empaneled the task force to investigate a contract with one of the county’s IT vendors, StarCIO. The owner of the company, Isaac Sacolick, is the brother-in-law of County Human Resources Commissioner Langdon Chapman. The contract drew sharp criticism from Democrats in the legislature and State Senator James Skoufis after the agreement, which was supposed to be for two months and $65,000 grew to more than $800,000 over a year-long period.
The task force found no criminality in the selection of the company; however, the legislature concluded that there was often sloppy or incomplete paperwork in the contract selection process and that the contract was improperly procured. The legislature’s report was critical of D’Amico.
“This Committee was also concerned with information provided to potential vendors prior to a contract award,” the report stated. “Ms. D’Amico provided the metrics of the County’s Information Technology division to StarCIO prior to entering into a contract with the vendor. By her own admission, the information should not be available to the general public but she had no response when she was asked why she transmitted that information to a vendor with which the County had no official business or contract, and who, at that point in time, was simply a member of the general public. The Committee recommends that greater care should be taken in preventing transmittal of confidential information for purposes of obtaining quotes or conveying data relative to services that a vendor may need to provide.”
In its report, the committee also addressed concerns about the contract’s extension and payments that were made in excess of the contract, concluding that the county’s procurement policy was not followed. Sweikata, as the commissioner of General Services, was tasked with overseeing the contract procurement process.
“In the instant matter, invoices in excess of the agreed upon contract amount were paid, when there was not yet a contract extension in place to authorize same,” per the report. “The payment approval of those particular invoices should not have been authorized in that instance. Relative to contract extensions, the process outlined in the Procurement Policy must be followed.”
D’Amico was named director of Operations in April of 2022. She previously served in the county executive’s office as assistant to the county executive from 2014 to 2016. D’Amico then served as deputy commissioner of General Services before returning to the county executive’s office for a second stint.
Sweikata was named commissioner of General Services and Information Technology in January 2023. Before her commissioner appointment, she was the department’s deputy commissioner.
D’Amico and Sweikata did not return calls seeking comment on Tuesday.
