Conservative Cash Flow

We don’t call this a “pipeline” for nothing. When the Town Board learned that town employees administering the 6.4 million dollar contract of Casale Excavating for Water District 14 had authorized payments well in excess of the stipulated bid, calls for an investigation began. How could town employees, in particular a building inspector have signed authorizations approving all that extra money over the bid and never tell the elected town board they were exceeding the contract price?
Usually the process of notification is two fold. The contractor has an obligation under the contract to notify the town that he will need to exceed the contract price. This should causes town officials to prepare “change orders” to be submitted which both notify the Town Board of the potential need to exceed the bid and permit the Board to vote on the increase, either approving or disapproving.
Instead, unelected, appointed employees circumvented the process of notification to the Board by simply submitting the payment requests of the contractor, never informing anyone they were exceeding the bid price. Worse, they never once consulted the town’s legal staff in the process.
As a result of the over runs, the Town Board voted last December 14th to ask the State Comptroller to both audit and investigate the payments. The two Conservatives on the Board, Mr. Evers and Mr. Kern voted against the audit.
The how of obfuscating the requirements of the contract that protect taxpayers from such unauthorized payments will be more clearly spelled out in the State Comptroller’s audit. The why of the payment process is seemingly rooted in politics and hopefully nothing darker. The building inspector who had been approving the payments to Casale Excavating is Michael Miner, now a Conservative Committeeman loyal to his party chairman Michael Casale of Casale Excavating. Mr. Miner is one of the employees dismissed when the new town board initially took over, only to be rehired weeks later. His political clout also comes from his family ties as a cousin to Town Clerk Kathryn Connolly.
The Pipeline has received a copy of a memo Mr. Miner wrote to Conservative ally, Town Supervisor Mark Evers on January 25, 2007. The memo attempts to explain why it was “legal” to exceed the stipulated bid price without a change order and without ever informing elected officials. Conservative Committeeman Miner tells Conservative Supervisor Evers that “we did not believe that a change order was required when a unit price quantity exceeded the estimated quantity even though it would impact the final contract price”. Such reasoning served the interest of the contractor at the direct and explosive expense of the taxpayers. In other words Mr. Miner is trying to justify the illegal overpayments by interpreting the contract in a way that is both specious and usurping the legal authority of the elected town board to approve overpayments through the use of mandated change orders. It’s like saying you can use twice as much pipe at $10.00 per foot as the contract permits so long as the price per foot does not go up. That amounts to giving the contractor a BLANK CHECK which so far has caused $740,000 to be given out over the bid with the work not completed!
Using this interpretation, the bid price becomes irrelevant and the competitive bidding process is made meaningless. A contractor could bid a ridiculously low number under such an interpretation and exceed the bid without any limit if this methodology is accepted. Obviously the planned use of this interpretation wasn’t known to Highlander Construction, the high bidder in the second round of bids or they might have come in at a 4 or 5 million dollars instead of 7.1 million
It is noteworthy that all of this legal interpretation was done without the knowledge or advice of any of the town’s staff of attorney’s, who unlike the building department employees, have law degrees and are schooled in contract interpretation and enforcement. Had they been consulted, the payments hopefully would have been disapproved without justifiable change orders as required by law.
One final bit of disturbing news in this memo. Taxpayers took it on the chin at least one other time according to the admission of Mr. Miner in his memo. He writes “Twenty one unit price bid items of the Water District 12 contract exceeded the estimated quantities. No change orders were issued for these unit price items and the project exceeded the Base Bid Proposal by over 5%".How does Supervisor Evers address this mismanagement in the Building Department? By doing everything possible to keep a Board appointed supervisor from taking charge and hopefully turning down the faucet of this Conservative cash flow and through the legally required controls that are currently being ignored. That’s where the word POLITICS enters the picture to lighten your wallets.