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“He’s doubled down on cryptocurrency,” Felipe-Adams said in a December interview for a podcast produced by Urban Change, a crypto initiative.
Indeed, Mayor Adams made a rare mention of the office during a May 2022 appearance at a “Security Token Summit” in Manhattan, when he acknowledged Felipe-Adams and Salomons in a brief speech. Felipe-Adams was listed as a speaker at that crypto conference, whose other guests ranged from Brooke Shields to the former Donald Trump spokesman Anthony Scaramucci.
City Hall did not answer questions about why Adams never announced the office’s creation or whether Felipe-Adams and Salomons had any expertise relevant to their roles, although a spokesman said both have “significant experience working in government.”
“Mayor Adams believes our city must do a better job of harnessing cutting-edge technologies that make municipal services more efficient and effective, and the Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets is critical to advancing that vision,” mayoral spokesman Jonah Allon said. “Under the co-leadership of Denise Felipe-Adams and Jonathan Salomons, the office speaks with a wide array of innovators with ideas about how to improve public safety, streamline government operations, and move our city forward, and shares its findings with partners across city government.”
Multiple people who deal with the administration on tech issues said the office seemed to overlap with the separate Office of Technology and Innovation, which is assumed to be the main clearinghouse for new technologies being piloted by the city. Allon said that Innovation and Emerging Markets is not housed within OTI, and that Felipe-Adams and Salomons report directly to City Hall Chief of Staff Camille Varlack.
But Adams has shown a willingness to create overlapping offices before. Keechant Sewell’s surprise resignation as police commissioner in June came after Adams elevated allies Pearson and Banks to senior public safety roles that seemed to sometimes supersede hers.
A handful of companies have listed Salomons or Felipe-Adams as lobbying targets, records show, including a supplier of air purifiers interested in procurement deals, a Las Vegas-based artificial intelligence company, and the Home Depot, which wanted to discuss legislation combating organized retail crime. From spring 2022 until March of this year, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase hired lobbyists Bolton-St. Johns to arrange meetings with Felipe-Adams and Salomons and explain how their platform “can benefit New Yorkers,” according to one filing.
Felipe-Adams was paid $123,000 last year, city records show—up from her most recent salary of $111,792 as a special assistant at the borough president’s office, where she began in 2017 at $70,000.
‘I tend to be the more critical one’
On Eric Adams’ mayoral campaign, Felipe-Adams, who is Dominican American, served as a strategic advisor for Latinx alliances, according to her LinkedIn profile. She was pictured alongside the now-mayor at his Election Night party at the exclusive Zero Bond nightclub in November 2021, and emceed a Dominican Heritage celebration at Gracie Mansion this month.
Salomons, who described himself in the December interview as being “on loan” to the mayor’s office, received a $149,068 salary from the NYPD last year. City records do not show him receiving any separate salary from the mayor’s office.
In last year’s interview for the Urban Change podcast, Salomons hinted at differences between how he and Felipe-Adams view these prospective business partners.
“One of the things the NYPD has taught me is to be very careful about how we review a company,” he said. “I tend to be the more critical one.”
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