As if President Barack Obama hasn’t already had enoughproblems with vetting his Cabinet, it now turns out Adolfo Carrión, the former Bronx borough president andnewly minteddirector of the Office of Urban Policy, may have failed to pay an architect who performed work on his house. An architect whose sizable project the Beep happened to sign off on just months before renovations took place. TheDaily Newsbroke the storyon Mondayand has been following it closely ever since.

But it wastoday in theTimesthat we got what we’d really been waiting for. No, not news that the Bronx district attorney’s office is looking into the allegations, though that is good to hear, too. What we had yet to see so far was a good picture of the house, which, as you can see above, is none too shabby. (GoogleStreet Viewjust wasn’t doing it because, as best we can tell, the house is down a long driveway.)

To bring you up to speed, on Monday, theNewsalleged that Carrión had not paid his architect,Hugo Subotovsky, for renovation work dating to 2006. The paper also noted that around the same time, the architect had gotten approval from Carrión during the ULURP process for Boricua Village, a 452-unit,mixed-use development projectthat includesa new campusfor Boricua College, the independent university serving a largely Latino student body.

Two days later, Carriónacknowledgedthat he failed to pay the architect for the work, which entailed adding a porch and balcony to his Victorian house on City Island at a reported cost of about $36,000, including $3,627.50 in architectural fees. Carrión said he had yet to pay the architect because a “final survey” had not yet been filed with the city, despite the work being completed in early 2007.

The same story also noted that Carrión had actually signed off on three of Subotovsky’s projects:

In a second case, Carrión recommended approval of a housing development on St. Ann’s Ave. on May 27, 2008. Two months later, he announced he was sponsoring $3 million in taxpayer funds for the project.

Carrión approved a third project, an 8-story, 128-unit housing complex called Shakespeare Place, on Oct. 24, 2007.

The thing is, if you know anything about the ULURP process, there should be nothing unseemly about a borough president signing off on a local architect’s work, especially one, who, from the look of his site, practices almost exclusively in said borough.

The problem is that Carrión should know better. For an honorable project like the Boricua campus and a hard-working architect to get sucked into a political morass is a shame. And yet, Carrión was out there todaydefending himself, claiming that he had done nothing wrong and would pay the fees in due course.