Former Rochester mayoral candidate and good-government group head Rachel Barnhart has filed an ethics complaint against Rochester’s deputy mayor.
Barnhart claims Cedric Alexander is likely performing outside work on city time and has outside jobs that amount to conflicts of interest. She says these need to be investigated.
City Communications Director Jim Smith answers that Alexander isn’t paid for his outside work, so doesn’t have conflicts. Smith says Alexander does not get paid for appearing as an analyst on CNN, or for his position as a professor at the University of Rochester. He says Alexander was not paid to keynote at a conference sponsored by Axon/Taser which does business with the city, and that speech was arranged before Alexander worked for the city. Finally, Smith says Barnhart isn’t impartial since she lost to Mayor Lovely Warren in the Democratic primary.
Barnhart says this doesn’t explain why Alexander was away from City Hall 28 days in 25 weeks, just seven of those days listed as official business. And she says the city’s many partnerships with the U of R make his remaining as a professor there questionable.