Outgoing Mayor Josh Cohn spent more than $2,500 of his own money on a prominent municipal ethics attorney to review the city’s ethics code, an analysis of a more than two-year-old tree-cutting controversy that the mayor claims now “vindicates” him.
Cohn personally paid Steven Leventhal, an attorney with the state Bar Association’s Local and State Government Section Committee on Ethics and Professionalism who advises several local municipalities, to conduct the informal review of the code and also evaluate a 2023 opinion rendered by the city Board of Ethics.
It cost the mayor $2,625 for work Leventhal did in October and Cohn expects to compensate the attorney for additional work this month, he told The Record. The mayor had previously proposed hiring Leventhal for no more than $10,000 — in a move that was voted down by a bipartisan majority of the City Council.
Leventhal’s work was not formally sanctioned by the City Council.
For more than a year, the mayor has repeatedly expressed his indignation publicly with a February 2023 advisory opinion of the city Board of Ethics that found Cohn, who is politically unaffiliated, Deputy Mayor Julie Souza, a Democrat, and former council members Carolina Johnson and Ben Stacks had acted improperly by calling for an emergency meeting and voting to expedite a tree-clearing moratorium in an effort to prevent the removal of trees near Cohn’s Green Avenue home.
In his letter to Cohn, Leventhal wrote that his analysis found that advisory opinion to be “flawed both in substance and in the procedure by which it was rendered” and added that an update of the city’s code of ethics, which was drafted into law back in the 1960s, was “long overdue.”
“Among other things, the Code of Ethics should explicitly state that the Board of Ethics may render advisory opinions only to City officers and employees inquiring about their own conduct, or about the conduct of someone that they have the duty to supervise,” Leventhal wrote. “The advisory function should act as a shield, not as a sword.”
Leventhal’s letter claimed the “opinion expressed by the Board of Ethics should be regarded as a nullity.”
Cohn called the analysis “devastating” and added that it “vindicates Carolina Johnson, Julie Souza, Ben Stacks and me.”
“We were abused,” he continued. “We were right to object.”
Republican Councilman Bill Henderson slammed the whole process as “irresponsible.”
“The fact that the council hasn’t worked together for the last year is the mayor’s fault, because he couldn’t rise above this whole thing and lead like a leader,” Henderson said. “Instead, he’s been fuming for two years over the fact that that he couldn’t bully the board of ethics to do what he wanted.
“It’s absolutely outrageous.”
Following the ethics board’s ruling in 2023, Cohn, Souza, Johnson, and Stacks took the unprecedented step of suing the city that June, approving funds both to pursue the lawsuit and to cover the city’s defense. The group eventually dropped the lawsuit amid strong community backlash.
On Nov. 19, Cohn urged the council to hire Leventhal to begin a formal review of the ethics code.
In his attempts to expedite the process before he and Souza leave office at the end of the year, Cohn tried to facilitate the council to schedule a special meeting with the attorney prior to the body’s next scheduled meeting on Dec. 3.
The council ultimately voted 5-2 to table the discussion until Dec. 3, with Cohn and Souza voting the motion down.
Mayor-elect Josh Nathan, a Democrat, said he planned to read the Leventhal’s letter and would also take a fresh look at the New York Conference of Mayor’s opinion that Cohn solicited back in January.
“I am comfortable doing that, and I’m comfortable revisiting this topic,” he said.
But even if the current council decides to take up a formal review of its ethics code, the work will likely bleed into 2026, when a new council will be installed — with Nathan at the helm.
Fixing the city’s ethics code is more than “a technical matter,” Cohn said, “it’s for the benefit of Rye residents who expect and deserve an effective local government.”
Leventhal’s review, the mayor told The Record, “should lead to much-needed improvements in the ethics code and clear guidelines for the Board of Ethics.”
It’s “time the City Council acknowledged that NYCOM and Leventhal nailed it,” Cohn said.
