What happens in Mayor de Blasio’s administration when you’re caught misusing your city-owned car? You get a promotion.
A city official who drove his government vehicle to a birthday party in Virginia — and claimed he was on the job the whole time because he answered phone calls and e-mails — was quietly rewarded with a plum job running the Mayor’s Office of Operations, The Post has learned.
De Blasio donor Jeff Thamkittikasem was among 21 Department of Correction executive staffers who were excoriated last year for costing taxpayers thousands of dollars through their “systemic” abuse of take-home vehicle privileges.
While the scandal uncovered by the Department of Investigation led ex-Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte to retire in disgrace, Thamkittikasem, who had been Ponte’s chief-of-staff, was shifted to the Mayor’s Office in August and given the nebulous title of “special assistant.”
Thamkittikasem, who continued earning $221,150 a year, was given the job of senior adviser to First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, City Hall said.
But just a month later, Thamkittikasem was given a $15,000-a-year raise, and put in charge of the Office of Operations, which oversees the 311 system and “works to make New York City government more effective and efficient,” according to the department’s Web site.
The agency is also supposed to “improve transparency and accountability,” yet Thamkittikasem’s appointment wasn’t announced publicly beyond an obscure notice in the City Record’s registry of payroll changes.
That move contrasted sharply with the press release issued by City Hall in October to tout the appointment of a chief analytics officer under Thamkittakasem, with de Blasio gushing how “excited” he was by the arrival of the new staffer, Kelly Jin.
“I know Kelly has the experience and the drive to use our data resources to help City Hall and city agencies make better decisions and craft better policies, as well as manage the largest Open Data program in the country,” de Blasio said at the time.
Campaign-finance records show Thamkittikasem, 42, has donated $10,000 to de Blasio since 2013, when de Blasio first ran for mayor, with the most recent contribution, for $500, made in October 2017.
Thamkittikasem’s enthusiasm was so great that de Blasio’s campaign had to return $1,000 in 2013 because the donor’s contributions that year exceeded the annual $4,950 limit.
In a report last year, the city Department of Investigation said that Thamkittikasem twice traveled to the Washington, DC, area during 2016, and that his time sheets claimed “that this travel was for official business.”
Thamkittikasem has admitted that one trip was made to deal with an unspecified “problem” at “a residence he owned in downtown, DC,” while the other trip was to attend a birthday party at “a friend’s house on Virginia’s Chesapeake coast” — with a stop to pick up another friend at Baltimore International Airport.
Thamkittikasem told the DOI that “since he answered phone calls and emails while he was out of town, he considered that the equivalent of being at work,” even though he couldn’t physically respond to an emergency, the report said.
His claim of being on “24-hour call” was also contradicted by his admission that he went “off duty” when his parents visited him in New York, including during repeated trips to and from local airports in his official city vehicle, the report said.
Thamkittikasem declined to comment and referred The Post to City Hall, where spokesman Raul Contreras said, “Jeff has a proven track record fighting for social justice and overhauling systemic barriers that have marginalized New Yorkers.”
Additional reporting by Bruce Golding
