The city’s Board of Elections rejected a recommendation by a city investigative agency to fire its leader after concluding that he made repeated sexual and racial remarks that created a hostile work environment.

"Those were significant pervasive comments," Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber told NY1.

Board of Elections commissioners decided to suspend the board's director Michael Ryan for making the comments to a woman who worked for the agency and later resigned.

The report from described the comments as "sexually suggestive" and sometimes "paired with inappropriate physical gestures." Other comments from Ryan centered around her ethnicity.

"This is obviously very serious conduct," Strauber said.

During the investigation, another woman who worked at the Board of Elections alleged that Ryan made "ethnicity- and gender-based comments towards her or in her presence, which she stated were unwanted, unwelcome, and offensive."

The DOI recommended that elections commissioners fire Ryan. Instead, they decided in December to suspend Ryan without pay for three weeks, make him take sensitivity training and place him on probation for a year.

"I want to express my deepest apologies to my family, my colleagues and to anyone that I unintentionally offended," Ryan said in a statement. "While I dispute these allegations and disagree with the report's conclusions, I accept the determination of the commissioners in the best interests of the agency."

Another Board of Elections worker, administrative manager Michael Corbett, got a one week suspension, training and year-long probation for discussing "with Ryan the topic of appropriate age differences for dating" in the presence of the first woman who complained.

NY1 investigated Ryan back in 2018 for being on the board of a company that made ballot scanners for the city — a position that paid for flights to company conferences and hotel stays.

"It's structured to answer really only to political parties and party bosses," Ben Weinberg, policy director of the good government group, Citizens Union, said. "The Board of Elections can avoid even the most basic standards of accountability and workplace protections. In this case, it avoided following the city's equal employment opportunity policies."

The board's process for Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints was also the focus of the investigation

"Not having a functioning EEO office and not having a process in place to investigate senior staff members is part of the significant deficiencies that we've found," Strauber said.