LaBrake left N.Y. under a cloud

City official Steve LaBrake quit his previous job over questions about his use of housing funds.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD and JEFF TESTERMAN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 8, 2001

LaBrake

TAMPA -- When Steve LaBrake was forced from his job as building chief of a tiny upstate New York town in 1985, city leaders took no chances. They changed his office locks.

"We didn't trust him," said Robert Mason, who served on the governing board of the city of Penn Yan at the time.

These days, LaBrake is head of Tampa's business and community services division, and facing a federal investigation into whether he used his position to arrange a bargain-basement price on a posh South Tampa home for his girlfriend. The contractor building the house has received more than $1-million in work through LaBrake's office in recent years.

A look at LaBrake's history in Penn Yan, where he worked from 1980 to 1985 as director of the city's community planning and development department, shows this isn't the first time he has faced scrutiny on ethical matters or allowed his private dealings to become tangled with his official role.

In Penn Yan, where LaBrake oversaw building projects, housing redevelopment and millions of dollars in state and federal grants, he steered funds to builders who did poor work or no work at all, said Dan Taylor, the former Penn Yan city attorney who investigated the case.

"There was no question he was filing false statements on the way these deals were progressing," Taylor said. "These contractors were getting paid before they finished their work."

LaBrake also sold building materials to contractors through his own business, Taylor said, but there was no evidence LaBrake ever pocketed public funds.

As the allegations poured in, LaBrake got an ultimatum.

"We gave him a choice of a full-scale investigation, or he could resign and leave," said Mason, the former city board member. "After blowing a lot of hot air and steam and threatening suits, he just quietly resigned and left."

Mason said he visited several homes at which LaBrake was supposedly supervising work and found work that "didn't even meet minimum regulations" -- in one case, a bathroom window installed upside down and backward.

"Some of the work he was having contractors do was very shoddy, very substandard," Mason said.

LaBrake would have been fired if he hadn't quit, Mason said.

LaBrake's questionable dealings in Penn Yan go further.

For three years while he worked for the city, deciding where grant money should go, LaBrake kept another job as a salesman for a Penn Yan real estate firm called Bucky Lane Real Estate.

LaBrake partnered with Floyd "Bucky" Lane, who ran the firm, to buy and renovate a 4,000-square-foot railroad freight station in 1984. Before that, the local Finger Lakes Times newspaper reported, Lane had received thousands of dollars in grant money through LaBrake's office.

In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times Tuesday, Lane said LaBrake steered a $100,000 Housing and Urban Development grant his way in 1985 to rehabilitate a Penn Yan hotel. LaBrake then moved his laundry-cleaning business into the hotel as a tenant.

Lane thinks city leaders gave LaBrake a "dirty deal" in running him out of Penn Yan.

"He tore this town apart and put it back together for them," Lane said. "He got them a lot of (grant) money. He was a very aggressive guy. Straight as an arrow."

Robert K. Hull, who became mayor of Penn Yan in 1987, two years after LaBrake left, said that LaBrake damaged the city's reputation with HUD and that the FBI had investigated the case. "Within a couple years we were able to get back in the good graces of HUD," Hull said. He did not know the outcome of the FBI investigation.

It was only four months after leaving Penn Yan in 1985 that LaBrake started work for the city of Tampa. LaBrake did not return calls for comment Tuesday.

On job applications filed with the city, LaBrake has offered various explanations for why he left Penn Yan. "Promotion," he wrote on one. On another: "Relocated/Program funding."

There's no mention of the controversy dogging his stint there.

"Everybody that was connected with the local government was very happy to see him go," said Mason, the former Penn Yan board member. "I don't remember anybody shedding a tear."

- Christopher Goffard can be reached at (813) 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com.

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