On January 30, Ulster County Department of Mental Health announced an RFP (request for proposals) to identify a contractor to provide “Recovery Housing Services for individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) and co-occurring mental-health challenges.”
Whoever responds by the February 28 cutoff date, it won’t be the addiction recovery non-profit organization Samadhi Center, Inc. After years of lucrative county contract work, Samadhi’s founder and executive director David McNamara said, the organization he founded will no longer pursue county contracts. So ends a relationship between the non-profit and the county which began in 2020 and has continued up to the present.
Samadhi as of 2023 was not hurting for money. As first reported in HV1, the organization had managed to attract $864,000 from Peter Buffett’s Novo Foundation.
On February 5, Ulster County comptroller March Gallagher released a report castigating a lack of fiscal safeguards and called into question unusual board oversight practices, insufficient recordkeeping and questionable expenditures.
Gallagher stopped all payment on contractually obligated funding back in January 2024, and has since discouraged further business with the non-profit as vendor. McNamara’s response to the allegations may be an iteration of the well-worn rejoinder “You can’t fire me because I quit.”
That the non-profit has been a magnet for re-hashed controversy can be laid at the feet of McNamara himself. He has provided incomplete explanations of past behaviors, pre-eminent among them the unresolved issue of more than $55,000 in unsubstantiated ATM withdrawals.
Gallagher alleges that McNamara was also passing himself off as an alcohol and substance abuse counselor, when in reality he was an uncertified trainee to that position. McNamara’s explanation for the misrepresentation suggests a sort of Internet puffery. He hired employees qualified to perform the oversight that he wanted it to be understood that he himself performed.
The comptroller’s report took issue with the unusually small size of Samadhi’s governing board — allegedly three members, only two of whom, McNamara himself and county legislator Kathy Nolan, have been accounted for. According to “a whistleblower” quoted in the comptroller’s report, “Kathy and David decide everything.”
In the course of her investigation, Gallagher requested Samadhi board meeting minutes. She says they were never provided.
In an interview with Kingston Wire‘s Jesse Smith, McNamara defended his organization’s sloppy accounting by noting that “this had all been addressed previously” and that the comptroller was “recycling old charges for maximum political impact” ahead of this year’s election.
McNamara is also counseling patience ahead of the findings from another audit expected to be released this year. He says it will demonstrate that Samadhi has adopted new controls and improvements in the way it does business, and so renders the comptroller’s complaints moot.
For his part, Saugerties legislator Joe Maloney has been tireless in his years-long persecution of the non-profit, relentlessly hounding both the organization and his colleague in the legislature, Kathty Nolan. He has alleged ethics complications for Nolan’s role on the board of the non-profit, taken issue with a $14,418 loan which she had made to the organization, castigated Samadhi’s known financial irregularities — all of this in the full legislature, in various committees, and in emailed copies to his legislative colleagues and members of the county administration. Maloney’s aggressive kettle-banging style of deliberative intercourse has earned him few allies, but on this issue he appears to have been ahead of the curve for some time now, waiting for the rest of the legislature to catch up.
Gallagher herself has referred Nolan to the county ethics board, accusing the legislator of attempting to accost her in the county parking lot after committee one evening “to get her to see things her way.” Nolan has dismissed the interaction as a friendly conversation. The ethics board let her off with a tepid reprimand.
Nolan did not try to hide her $14,418.11 loan to the non-profit. She revealed it herself on her financial disclosure form, and Samadhi has since repaid the loan. Except for a heated exchange at one committee meeting, Nolan has managed to recuse herself from every vote and any discussion affecting the non-profit’s fortunes and its relationship with the county.
Even before Novo’s largesse, the intervening years had recorded heady growth for the non-profit. When first incorporated in 2018, Samadhi received a reported $5321 in income for the year. As drug overdoses increased precipitously during the pandemic, so too did Samadhi’s revenues, which climbed to a reported $1.2 million in 2022.
Samadhi currently operates a recovery center at 150 Sawkill Road in Town of Ulster and holds a lease at 368 Broadway in Kingston, a county-owned building paid for under contract with county funds.
Samadhi also maintains a rent-to-own agreement for a property at 451 Washington Avenue in Saugerties — Green’s Inn, a 28-room motel which Gallagher says is let out as emergency housing. At least 20 motels countywide are utilized for temporary emergency housing, paid for by the county.
For all involvement to be complete, only one outstanding invoice remains which Samadhi is expecting the county to honor, it says. That’s for payroll and rent expense arrears totaling $62, 362 for November and December of 2023.
Then both parties could go their separate ways.
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