Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is spending $250,000 of city money to sponsor an upcoming tech conference whose organizer recently worked for Frank Carone, Adams’ political fixer and former chief of staff.
The Smart City Expo USA is scheduled to be held in Lower Manhattan from May 22 to 23, and is touting Adams and more than a dozen other top city officials as speakers. Initially scheduled for October 2023, organizers canceled the conference four days before its start date. They publicly blamed heavy rainfall, but five people familiar with the event’s planning who spoke with Crain’s New York Business attributed the postponement to poor ticket sales and a lack of corporate sponsorships.
Mayor Adams has promoted the revived Expo as a chance to explore solutions to climate change and public safety: “As the tech mayor, I am committed to pushing our city forward,” Adams said in a video message first posted to the conference’s YouTube page in April.
But Adams has not publicly mentioned his administration’s financial support for the event, nor the organizers’ ties to his personal orbit: Aarti Tandon, the CEO of the for-profit company that runs Smart City Expo, last year worked for Carone’s lobbying and consulting firm, Oaktree Solutions. Carone and one of his current employees, Matthew Quinonez, were both copied on an outreach email, reviewed by Crain’s, that Tandon sent last year to prospective speakers and sponsors.
The Adams administration’s $250,000 commitment is seen by some as extraordinarily high for a city sponsorship of a privately produced event. Sources told Crain’s that the payment has aroused concerns within the city’s Economic Development Corp., which is listed online as a “visionary sponsor” of the Expo and has helped coordinate the city’s support along with the Office of Technology and Innovation.
The mayor’s office and EDC declined to answer questions about how the administration became involved in the conference and whether Carone had any influence on the sponsorship, instead referring Crain’s to a statement by the Office of Technology and Innovation.
“As we continue to build New York City’s tech sector and our future-focused sectors, like green economy and life sciences, the city has proudly supported a broad range of economic development efforts, including events like the Smart City Expo, which attract visitors from around the world,” wrote spokesman Ray Legendre. “We look forward to welcoming attendees to help bolster our city’s economy and advance innovation to improve life for New Yorkers.”
Carone, reached for comment on Friday, initially told Crain’s that he “was never involved in it in any iteration, ever.” When pressed, however, he conceded that he had planned to solicit private-sector sponsors for last year’s Expo and “provide seed money myself to the organization” running the event.
“You’ve got to start from somewhere,” he said. But Carone said he never made the intended investment and has no financial stake in the event. The Expo is Tandon’s “baby,” Carone said, adding that he assisted Tandon while she worked for Oaktree but severed ties to the conference last year when she left his company on amicable terms after a short tenure. Tandon continued to lead Smart City Expo USA, where she has been CEO since 2019.
“We were going in a different direction, quite frankly, internationally,” Carone said. The Expo, he added, was “not something we had the infrastructure or desire to work on, so we amicably decided to go our separate ways.”
Oaktree had announced Tandon’s planned hire as a managing director in May 2023, two days before the city announced it would host the Smart City Expo.
Several people who have worked with Tandon on the Expo told Crain’s they were unaware she had ever been affiliated with Oaktree. Tandon declined to comment on her affiliation with Oaktree, and Carone did not respond to follow-up questions about when she stopped working there.
“We postponed the conference because it just wasn’t the right time to host it,” Tandon said in an emailed statement in response to questions about the event. “Glad we waited because it’s going to be great.”
Much of the conference is marketed toward entrepreneurs interested in doing business with cities. John Kaehny, executive director of the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, argued that it makes little sense for New York City to sponsor an event geared toward companies trying to score public contracts.
“It is a concern when the city is directly subsidizing events for vendors whose goal is to sell stuff to the city,” Kaehny said. “That’s taxpayer money, and you have to say, what is the point of that expenditure given that the city is already hosting?”
‘I haven’t heard any buzz’
The Adams administration initially committed $250,000 to last year’s event through a June 2023 vote by the board of the Economic Development Corp., whose members are appointed by the mayor. The $250,000 was a one-time “sponsorship contribution” that is now being used to produce this year’s event, Office of Technology and Innovation spokesman Legendre said in an email.
Legendre said the city’s support also included identifying speakers from within the administration, but it is unclear whether that extends to staffing help or other resources. The deal approved by EDC’s board last year included both the $250,000 sponsorship and also “any needed funding source agreements” for the Expo.
The Office of Technology and Innovation was listed as EDC’s partner in securing the city funding, and the Expo website refers to OTI as a “host” of the conference. The office is a mayoral agency whose leader, Matthew Fraser, was appointed by Adams.
Carone said he played no role in asking the Adams administration to put up money for the conference. He was legally barred from lobbying his former City Hall colleagues for one year after he departed the administration at the end of 2022, and still has not registered as a lobbyist. Several of his employees are registered lobbyists, however, and Carone has been open about the fact that he advises his clients about how to approach his former colleagues in city government.
Tandon said in an email that New York City has been “extremely supportive” of the conference, noting that the National League of Cities and the African American Mayors Association are serving as co-hosts. Given plans to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the region, Tandon said, “it only makes sense to convene leaders in NYC to talk about modernizing our airports, the latest innovations in security, mobility, sustainability, and more.”
Opinions about the conference are mixed. Several people told Crain’s they planned to attend this year’s Expo on Pier 36 in the East River, and said they were impressed by the extensive program and lineup of speakers — which, besides the slew of City Hall officials, also includes the mayors of a few mid-sized cities, the governor of New Mexico and dozens of executives in business and real estate.
But others in New York’s business and technology sectors said there was little organic demand for the Expo. The smart-city concept, which broadly calls for using digital infrastructure to improve city services, was a craze during the 2010s but commands less interest now, with attention having shifted to other topics like artificial intelligence.
“I haven’t heard any buzz or any kind of real energy coming out of that event,” said one well-connected tech industry figure.
Tandon, asked whether waning interest in the smart-city concept had been a hurdle for sponsorship and ticket sales, responded that “It’s unfortunate that some have not embraced making NYC ‘smart.’”
“The rest of the world is eating our lunch,” Tandon said in an email.
Some industry players said they see the conference as a valuable networking opportunity, although the attendee pool may be limited by its steep ticket prices — $1,095 for private-sector employees and $500 for people from the public sector or nonprofits. Organizers are marketing the Expo as a chance for startup founders to “Pitch your technology to cities,” and the Adams administration is indeed sending some of the officials in charge of New York’s multibillion-dollar contracts budget, like chief procurement officer Lisa Flores.
Abrupt cancellation
The decision to postpone last year’s conference appeared to be made abruptly — some city officials involved in planning only learned of the cancellation when it was announced publicly.
The event’s primary boosters inside the administration include Fraser, the chief technology officer who leads the Office of Technology and Innovation, two people said; Fraser is scheduled to give a welcome address before Mayor Adams’ kickoff speech at the Expo’s opening day on May 22. Other listed sponsors include Google, Accenture and Microsoft.
Tandon, a lawyer by trade, has an eclectic resume that includes stints as a documentary film producer and an advisor on Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign, where she worked on Black media engagement, according to her LinkedIn.
In the years before the pandemic, Tandon helped organize a previous series of smart city events in New York that several attendees recalled as successful. The current iteration, Smart City Expo USA, is a spinoff of a larger conference, the Smart City World Congress, held annually in Barcelona and sponsored by a Spanish trade group. The OTI spokesman told Crain’s that the Adams administration decided to support the Expo because of its affiliation with the Barcelona conference, a prominent event that last year drew 25,000 attendees.
In 2022, Tandon donated $400 to Adams’ re-election campaign, records show. Last year’s press release announcing her hire at Oaktree said she would serve as managing director for equity, entertainment and technology, working in the sports and media industries and focusing on “the intersection of profit and purpose.”
“One of the many things I admire about Aarti is that she meets people where they are,” Carone said of Tandon in last year’s announcement.
Carone has attracted considerable scrutiny for his decision to leave City Hall during the first year of the Adams administration and start his own firm — all while maintaining a leading role on Adams’ 2025 re-election campaign. Although critics see Carone as profiting from his connections to the mayor and his staff, Carone has maintained he is staying within ethical guidelines by not communicating directly with city agencies.
Mayor Adams, for his part, has a well-documented affinity for new and often unproven technologies. In March, he announced plans to install scanners in subway stations to detect weapons, although critics noted that the same machines had a dubious success record. Last year, Crain’s reported on the existence of an obscure two-person office Adams created to screen private-sector business pitches, with an apparent focus on cryptocurrency.
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Nick Garber , 2024-05-06 19:30:56
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