Judge Issues Restraining Order

Well, it finally happened. The Town Board’s Majority has finally had enough of Mark Evers and the interference of the politically charged Rensselaer County Civil Service Commission with their apparent ties to the union attempting to run town hall. After going to court to have a judge look at this particular travesty engineered by Evers with the help of friends who work for the commission, a judge has issued a TRO, temporary restraining order against them which will prevent them from taking the engineer position off the town payroll.

It’s something they should have done long ago when the Commission ignored the clearly stated powers of a town in Town Law to establish “Director” I each department, appointed by the Board who “shall be in the unclassified service”. The Commission, however, decided it was more important to help Evers keep a supervisor out of the Building Department, and ignored the Town Law, stating they could not create the Director position, even though the town has for example a Youth Director in charge of that department all ready.

In fact every time the town board as attempted to create positions Evers and the Union did not like, the Commission managed to go right along with their requests. This time, they went too far and the town on behalf of the newly hired Town Engineer who holds a license issued by the State, and went to court to stop the Commission and Evers from continuing to put the proverbial screws to this navy veteran and Annapolis graduate who left his private sector job in good faith to work for the town.

We visited this issue once before which you can review here, but what really smacks their previous action is an email from the State Civil Service Commission which basically makes a fool of the county Commission’s action in declaring Ranson Caola unqualified to be the town engineer.

Imagine a Civil Service bureaucrat telling a licensed engineer he isn’t qualified to be an engineer. The State smacks them by asking how in the world can you enforce a 30 year old out dated job description that fails even to state what kind of degree in civil engineering one needs to be qualified?

Time to update your job descriptions boys and girls and a State judge is about to help you. So an engineer will be permitted on the payroll despite Evers best efforts to stop it. Taxpayers will finally have a chance to have professionalism and supervision in the Building Department. Who knows, maybe we’ll get a contract administrator that interprets contracts to favor taxpayers instead of contractors!