Nassau County Democratic lawmakers are urging federal authorities to investigate a proposed $24 million road surfacing contract with Baymen Industries, a company that the county’s inspector general alleged is tied to a bribery scandal.
Nassau County Inspector General Jodi Franzese issued a 17-page report alleging that Baymen Industries, a Glen Cove-based company, has overlap in leadership between Baymen Industries and Carlo Lizza & Sons Paving, whose owners bribed Oyster Bay town officials and were subsequently banned from doing business with the county.
The contract came up for discussion in May before the Republican-majority Nassau County Legislature, but its approval has not been scheduled for a vote.
Baymen Industries is “in some fashion, a de facto continuation of the former vendor Carlo Lizza & Sons Paving, Inc., a company with which the county will not do business,” Nassau County Inspector General Jodi Franzese wrote in her report.
The inspector general added that the county’s contract selection committee chose the contract despite numerous alleged deficiencies — questioning the company’s financial standing, lack of equipment to complete the paving job, and whether the contract wasn’t actually needed in the first place.
”Bruce Blakeman’s administration handing the road repaving contract to Baymen LTD, while sidelining numerous other qualified bidders, isn’t just a red flag — it’s a blaring siren,” Nassau County Legislator Seth Koslow (D-Merrick) told the Long Island Press.
Democrats in the legislature referred the contract to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office for further investigation, citing concerns of “potential corruption and improper oversight.”
“The decision to proceed with this contract raises serious red flags, and I believe there is evidence of potential conflicts of interest that merit federal investigation,” said Nassau County Minority Leader Delia DeRiggi-Whitton (D-Glen Cove), who submitted the contract to federal prosecutors.
Baymen Industries, County Executive Bruce Blakeman and U.S. Attorney General Breon Peace did not respond to requests for comment.
The contract was tabled, meaning it’s ready for the legislature to vote on at any time. The inspector general released its report in September. The legislature’s GOP majority also said it is taking a closer look at the proposed contract.
“We have received the IG’s report and have referred the matter to the County Attorney for analysis,” said Marry Studdert, spokesperson for the Republican-led legislative majority. “The contract has been tabled and no action has been taken.”
While the inspector general’s report cited Nassau County Department of Public Works (DPW) as saying that the agency did its due diligence and found “no evidence of any connection” between Baymen and Lizza & Sons, the inspector general’s office (OIG) found the opposite.
According to company documents included in the inspector general’s report, president and sole owner of Baymen Industries is Aly Nicholas Lizza, the son of Elia Lizza. Elia Lizza, owner of Carlo Lizza & Sons Paving, gave $1.6 million to the commissioner of planning and development for the Town of Oyster Bay for additional business opportunities.
Following Elia Lizza’s indictment in 2017, a Nassau spokesperson announced that the company would no longer be eligible to bid on county contracts unless all charges were dropped or acquitted. Elia Lizza pleaded guilty to bribery and was sentenced in 2020. His wife, Marisa, was also charged, but exculpated when Elia pleaded guilty.
Several senior personnel of Lizza & Sons are also affiliated with Baymen.
Some moved from one company to the other, “but more notably at least two of them appear to have been senior employees of both companies at the same time. This includes Baymen’s president-and-owner, Aly Nicholas Lizza,” the report states.
Aly Nicholas Lizza was the “second highest member” of Lizza & Sons’ corporate structure, one company document in the report states. The New York Daily News reported in 2017 that Aly Nicholas Lizza had “taken over the company from his father and runs it with his brother.”
The two companies also worked together on numerous projects. When Lizza & Sons was unable to complete a project for some reason, they referred clients to Baymen, which would complete the work. Further, documents in unrelated lawsuits implied that Baymen viewed itself as a continuation of Lizza & Sons, according to the report.
The county already has a multimillion-dollar contract in place with another company to repave roads through April 2025, raising questions as to why the additional contract was needed.
If the Baymen contract is implemented, the county would be paying two vendors for the same service. It is “unclear” why the new contract with Baymen was needed, the OIG report said, and the reason is not explained in documents submitted to the legislature.
Further, Baymen only owns two pieces of equipment it could use to complete the Nassau contract and admitted it would need to rent “seemingly basic” supplies to perform the necessary resurfacing work, the report stated, which is “surprising for an experienced autonomous company, and is concerning as to the proposed vendor’s capacity for a large, long-term contract.”
Meanwhile, the company already contracted with the county to provide road resurfacing work supplied a three-page list of its 90 items of equipment.
“OIG in any event questions the advisability of awarding a multi-year, multimillion-dollar contract to a company that has so very few basic in-house resources,” the report said. “OIG is not aware of a prior contract awarded by the county under similar circumstances.”
Baymen submitted “equipment rental agreements” to show the county what companies they’d get their equipment from. One agreement was with a competitor for the same resurfacing contract. It is not explained why the county chose Baymen for the contract rather than the company it would need to source its equipment from.
The other company is Emerson Equipment Rental — of which Marisa Lizza is president.
The DPW reported in its due diligence summary that it attempted to investigate Baymen’s bid bond to see if there were any affiliations to the previous owners of Lizza & Sons, Elia and Marisa Lizza, but “stopped short of obtaining certain information as it was conducting an “informal inquiry,” the report stated. “Its research on this point therefore was admittedly inconclusive.”
DPW also departed from policy when awarding Baymen this contract, the OIG alleged. If a contractor’s bid is 15% over or below the DPW engineer’s estimate of the lowest bid to responsibly accept, a subsequent justification is explicitly mandatory and must accompany the recommendation for that bid.
The DPW did not provide this justification, despite Baymen’s bid being 66% below the engineer’s estimate. The official contract, meanwhile, states that Baymen had the “lowest responsible” bid.
The spending cap, however, would be $24 million. Averaged over the 48-month contract, his would come out to $6 million a year — 50% higher than the $4 million the legislature recently approved for the one-year extension of the current resurfacing contract. The average is also well above the engineer’s estimate, the OIG said. Yet, the reason for the significantly higher spending cap awarded in the contract between Nassau and Baymen Industries is not explained in documents provided to the legislature.
An exceptionally low bid with a comparatively high spending cap means that a company like Baymen can be accepted on the basis for its original low cost, and then over the course of their work, increase their price up to the spending cap.
Companies that are given public contracts have “vendor responsibility,” or “the integrity to justify the award of public dollars and the capacity to perform fully the requirements of the contract,” the OIG report noted. Baymen’s lack of past performance, financial stability and operational capacity call its “vendor responsibility” into question, the OIG implies.
Baymen owners claimed to have 10 years of experience as of 2023. But when the company was first founded in 2013 — under a different name — it was an “entertainment business” company, and it “remains murky” when the company apparently transitioned to road milling and paving, the report stated. The OIG also called attention to the fact that the owners, for some reason, changed the name of their company twice within five years.
Further, Baymen’s previously cited lack of basic equipment “raises the question as to what extent Baymen has functioned for a decade as a stand-alone entity,” the report says.
In its resume to the county, Baymen submitted nine New York City contracts, but only two could be verified by the OIG. Some of the other contracts listed reflected Lizza & Sons, but not Baymen.
Baymen had bid on another county resurfacing contract in 2020 but was rejected after it lacked the necessary financial assets needed to securely submit a bid bond, according to the report. Baymen’s latest bid bond, the OIG found, was indemnified by Emerson Equipment Rental.
Also, in May 2023, Baymen was sued by its general liability and workmen’s compensation insurance company for its alleged failures to respond to an audit and to pay required increased premiums.
The Inspector General’s Office is “accordingly concerned that Baymen’s financial position/capacity apparently remains an open question.”
The OIG advised the county to “consider revisiting” their decision to potentially enter a contract with Baymen.
“Taxpayers should be asking if oversight is on vacation, because this kind of decision-making makes ‘trust us’ a hard pill to swallow,” Koslow told the Press. “Ultimately, it’s the taxpayers who foot the bill for poorly vetted contracts like these.”
