Dan's Papers - August 8, 2008 - In EH: Have We All Benn Accusing The Wrong Man?

As this is written, a petition is being brought around East Hampton that is expected to ultimately reach 1,000 signatures. It demands the resignation of Town Supervisor Bill McGintee.

As events have unfolded and charges have been made, it has occurred to me that there are a few things being made public which get buried under a rock that are in his defense. It seems to be in everybody's interest - except for McGintee's - that this be done. The Republican opponents of McGintee, who beat their candidate for supervisor last fall by just a whisker, don't want them brought out. And the press, which loves a good story, doesn't point them out because it's not part of the good story - McGintee's downfall. Also, there is a bandwagon effect. Once everyone says, "Jump on McGintee," these are just bothersome things that are exceptions to the rule. But are they?

It was recently revealed, for example, that when McGintee was elected, the town books were already seriously out of order. They were certainly $3.9 million out of order, if not more. The $3.9 million involved a ridiculous bookkeeping error that had gone on and on for nearly 10 years, since the Lester Administration.

It involved highway improvements. The money used for the highway improvements came from the Town Highway Department, as it should. But the highway department should have been reimbursed for its expenses from a bond the voters approved later. And though it was, this transaction was never posted.

Internally, therefore, the highway department appears to be $3.9 million in the red when it isn't. And the bond, which is not part of the town's audit, simply has less money, as it is supposed to.

Jay Schneiderman, who today is our County Legislator, was the town supervisor after Lester, but before McGintee. He has acknowledged the truth of this. He says that when he ordered the error to be repaired by the town's bookkeepers and auditors, it never was.

"When our auditors, Albrecht, Viggiano, Zureck and Company, did our audit for 2004, the negative balance was still there. We paid them. So what did they do? I passed the information on to McGintee about this when I left office. He never did anything."

McGintee says Schneiderman never told him about this. Furthermore, he says, he inherited a town accounting situation that was wildly out of control and with huge amounts of money borrowed which was being used to prop up prior administrations.

"Schneiderman borrowed and borrowed as the town went further and further into debt during his time here, more than $20 million, in fact, and now we are paying the interest on it."

He says the amount borrowed by the town under Schneiderman tripled from what it had been before.

Schneiderman replied that McGintee is just desperate to point fingers at this point, and that all capital projects under his administration were properly authorized and funded.

"We were saddled by the financial mess created by the Lester Administration," he said. The auditors said we had 17 points that had to be cleared up. We cleared up 14, I believe. We informed McGintee of the other three.

"In my administration, we added no new employees and held the line on our expenses and were able to reduce taxes slightly. The town's financial rating rose to the top. Now McGintee added at least 15 new employees. We had two dog control people. Now there are six. It's the same number of dogs. The new Town Hall construction he said would be $6 million. Now it turns out it'll be $15 million."

McGintee does not deny that things spun further out of his control during his administration. But he says where it did were in pensions and medical costs, which were not controllable. As for the rest, he is cutting back now that the financial rating of the town has plummeted.

McGintee says the deficit is $8 million.

So what did he do? He did what any homeowner might when discovering a big mess. He looked for money elsewhere. What do you do when you find you can't meet expenses, and that there is a huge sum of money - about a quarter of the family's annual income - set aside for another purpose? Well, if Uncle Charlie left that money for the college expenses of his kids, we'll just have to dip into it. Uncle Charlie would understand desperate circumstances.

Indeed, McGintee dipped into the preservation fund money for another reason. Not only was it one of his checkbooks, the rules for its use were not clearly spelled out. For example, it said you could use 10 percent of the money - that would be $2 million - for administrative costs for the land purchased for preservation. Just how big a stretch is it to say that if you send a police car up there, the cost of the officer and his car could be paid for out of that money?

Well, he did this. And he pointedly didn't tell anybody, particularly the Republican members of the town board who have been crying that they've been in the dark regarding town funds for about a year.

It's also clear that McGintee did not "steal" this money. He has a car the town pays for. What supervisor doesn't? He has some other perks. But we are not talking about funds that walked out and wound up as jewelry purchases or holidays in Cancun or purchases of a new home. McGintee, focused on many new public works, really was using this money for projects that greatly benefited the town - for example, the preservation of the six colonial homes that are now to be part of and the centerpiece of the new Town Hall.

His crime seems to have been to not be aware of what money he had, spending money he didn't have, hiding this from both his Republican councilmen and the public until after the election so it would look like everything was just fine, and denying that there was anything wrong, even right up until this day when the town dropped four rungs in the financial ratings.

Recent news is that one of McGintee's great public works he planned on is to be abandoned. His intention was to convert the wild and natural former Boys and Girls Harbor camp into a public park with playgrounds and ballfields.

And Larry Penny, the brilliant environmentalist and perhaps the town's most valuable employee, has been fired as part of the necessary cuts, and says he will sue on the basis of age discrimination.