Town Officials Mum on Health Insurance Bonanza

It's been a week now since we reported that taxpayers have been paying for the health insurance of one of the towns former employees who is now a vendor contracting services with the town.

For the past four years, taxpayers have been picking up the tab with no reimbursement for Tom Murley at a current monthly rate of $427.00, more than $5,000 annually. That means that to date taxpayers have improperly paid more than $20,000 to provide health insurance for this individual who is not entitled to it under any contract or other legal arrangement or policy.

You would think town board members would be screaming by now for a full reimbursement to the town from this vendor. It is especially surprising that neither Al Spain nor Lou Desso would have acted to both remove Murley from the policy and order a full reimbursement to taxpayers. Desso will be running for county legislature next year and doing nothing about such an egregious expenditure of public funds will do nothing to enhance his chance of finishing fourth in the legislative races. Spain has argued a need to enhance the policies governing health insurance in the town but was hopefully unaware that Murley was receiving such a totally unjustified benefit.

So we wait for town officials to explain why he is on the policy and what will be done to remove him and reimburse the town for the expenditure. They cannot legally gift the money under state law so this should be interesting.

A final note on Tom Murley. He's been around municipal government for some time and he clearly knows he is not entitled to this insurance from the taxpayers of North Greenbush. Why did he allow himself to be on the policy? Has he turned in claims on the policy over the past four years and if so, how much had the insurance carrier paid on his behalf? We'd love to know.

Comprehensive Plan on Planning Board Agenda

Tonight's Planning Board has a presentation by the no bid vendor hired to redo the completed Comprehensive Plan. Besides spending a year wasting our money and being given an expensive bone to do over an outstanding plan completed by a company that had to compete to be hired, the most that we can say is that the door has been held wide open to the developers for the past year while this town board majority refused to adopt the plan completed last December.

The Planning Board agenda is here.