The New York City Probation Department spent $37,500 last year to hire a public relations consultant in part to write an op-ed that the agency’s commissioner, Juanita Holmes, then oddly disavowed last Friday, the Daily News has learned.
The benign 794-word op-ed published Oct. 10 in the Amsterdam News became controversial during a Council budget hearing last week after Bronx Councilmember Amanda Farias asked Holmes to comment on her statements in the piece about combating recidivism.
“That is not my op-ed. It was never approved by me, never edited by me and released without my permission,” declared Holmes, a former NYPD chief who is close with Mayor Adams and was appointed by him in 2023.
A spokesperson for Mercury Public Affairs, the consultant hired by Probation, immediately countered the company had “worked closely with the commissioner and her team to help craft and submit the op-ed.” Probation even provided the picture of Holmes to go with the piece, a source said.
Now, contract documents reviewed by The News show Probation hired Mercury months earlier in June 2024 and paid the firm $20,000 on Oct. 2 and $17,500 on Oct. 7, three days before the op-ed was published.
Farias said Wednesday she was alarmed by the costly outlay.
“I specifically asked Commissioner Holmes about the op-ed, and she denied any knowledge or approval of it. Now, to learn that the op-ed was part of a $37,500 contract with an outside PR firm raises even more red flags,” Farias told The News. “How could a public relations firm produce and publish an op-ed on behalf of a city commissioner without the commissioner’s knowledge or approval? It feels disingenuous, and frankly, it undermines public trust in the agency’s transparency.”
Moreover, Farias questioned why the department would need to outsource communications in the first place.
“The DOP has its own press office and access to the communications resources of City Hall, so outsourcing basic communications functions like this — especially without apparent oversight or accountability—raises serious concerns,” she said. “We need to ensure that public funds are being used wisely.”
In the past week, Holmes has come under fire from her own staffers, Council members and the unions that represent her employees for high staff turnover, attrition in the probation officers ranks, and allegations of favoritism in hiring, as The News reported March 6.
On Thursday, officials with six municipal unions met with Holmes to hash out differences that have been building for months. The complaints focused on a lack of communication by Holmes and high-level staff turnover, people familiar with the discussion said.
Juanita Holmes. (Barry Williams for New York Daily News)
In an interview Wednesday, Holmes doubled down on her assertions about the Mercury contract, saying, “I never looked at it, I didn’t read it. I didn’t approve it. When that op-ed came out I was heated.”
She flatly denied working on the op-ed at all. “Absolutely not. They did not work closely with this commissioner,” she said.
She said the Mercury contract encompassed a media campaign and planning for a recruitment effort to cost $2.5 million. She claimed she was dissatisfied with the pitch and canceled the contract on Oct. 8.
“On Oct. 10 they released my op-ed. I was really, really annoyed,” she said.
A Mercury spokesperson countered that the company, a large public relations firm with offices in 12 cities, assembled tiered plans for a recruitment and retention campaign.
“That was intended for the Department’s advertising agency to implement and was not revenue that we would have been paid,” the spokesperson said.
“Not surprisingly, the Commissioner continues to misrepresent the facts involved in our short engagement. We are not going to continue to go back and forth on this and wish her and the department the best.”
A source familiar with the sequence said the op-ed was submitted and approved by Probation weeks before it was published, but constant staff turnover and Holmes’ “erratic leadership” put the company in an impossible situation.
The payment to Mercury was split into two parts — the $20,000 paid on Oct. 2 and $17,500 paid on Oct. 7, the records show.
That arrangement raised further questions because under city procurement rules, if a single contract exceeds $20,000 it becomes a “small purchase” and triggers a form of competitive bidding.
Anything $20,000 or less is a “micro-purchase” which requires no competitive bids.
But in both types of contracts, agencies are barred from “splitting” the value in two to stay under the threshold.
A probation official who did not include their name emailed The News, saying “The payment was split because one payment was a retainer.”