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Thursday, April 23, 2009

What the Town Prefers Not to, We Provide!


While it was a dull agenda overall, we are happy to let you listen to the meeting held April 24, 2009. The agenda is on the town web page here.

The town spent thousands of tax dollars to tape and broadcast these meetings on Time Warner Public Access. But for some reason they are in no rush to fix a piece of equipment they couldn't wait to buy to get control of the process a couple of years back. Actually, to be fair, the money for the camera was not authorized by the board, yet "appeared" one day in the ceiling. We'll leave it up to your imagination as to who authorized the bucks for the camera and equipment.

So here it is on the Pipeline Public Radio Channel, enjoy!

About Last Night...

After listening to last night’s meeting, it struck us how amazing Mark Evers comments were concerning the importance of water district attorney, Charles Sarris, to getting a contract approved for Poestenkill to get water through North Greenbush lines. Apparently no one on the Board, especially Evers, could get him on the phone before the meeting and they needed his approval on the wording of a proposed contract. (You're not alone guys, folks in Troy can't get him on the phone either according to Metroland.)

At one point the frustration of Poestenkill and North Greenbush officials caused Evers to inform all that he himself was hoping for a cell phone call from Sarris and you can hear his phone go off accidentally as Evers makes sure the ring volume is on.

All well and good except you will also then hear Evers inexplicably blurt out that Sarris as Troy’s top lawyer, has nothing to do with the contract because that would be a conflict of interest. Now there’s wishful thinking worthy of a classic contradiction.

Evers is right, Sarris would have a major conflict as Troy’s attorney who must approve all such contracts and North Greenbush’s attorney for the same contract. Given all the fuss about finding Mr. Sarris, you’d have to conclude something is mighty fishy here. But hey, Mark, since when do conflicts of interest bother you?

For years you’ve done nothing about the head of the Building Department, also a member of the Town Conservative Committee in ED 8, approving payments to his Party Chairman’s Company for Water 14. In fact even when those payments exceeded the contract price and bonding authority you did nothing about any apparent conflicts.

Hell, what’s a conflict of interest in this town anyway? Could it be that when Evers desperately wanted to receive the Conservative Party endorsement last year for Supervisor, that handing over that $83,000 check to the contractor that Chairs the party was a conflict of interest? No worse than the fact that the Board told him there was no legal authority left to pay nor any money left from the bond.

So why is Evers suddenly attempting to show concern for conflicts of interest? Perhaps because there is a glaring conflict of interest to have the town’s water district attorney involved in any way in a contract that he also must review and approve for the other party to the contract, the City of Troy. Too bad that call didn’t come in during the meeting. The conversation would have been a real gas. And can’t you see how much fun such contracts would be if Evers as Supervisor, were also a Troy City employee. Where should he sign Mr. Spain?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i hear that mike casale the conservative chairman is no longer employed by j.r. casale...so now what ??? does this blood fued mean no endorsement and no money for evers ? ur guess is as good as mine !!!!!!

Anonymous said...

I hear they split up to form separate companies in order to bid a bunch of times from seemingly "separate" companies on the new water contract there.

Anonymous said...

i heard the split was because mike was doing the all work and jr was getting all the money and also i think mike was worried about him being named in the class action law suit and being charged (along with p.patti) with malfeasance.