Greenville Fire District Leaders Outraged at Feiner's False Statements

A Letter to the Editor of the Scarsdale Inquirer from Robert Bruckenthal, the Greenville Fire District Board of Fire Commissioners Chairman, along with his entire board, highlighted erroneous statements made by Supervisor Feiner and Edie McCarthy, the Town Assessor. In and of itself, any letter to any editor usually elicits no more than a yawn, as residents discuss poor cable service, their missed garbage pickup, etc. This time was a bit different.

The Town, under direction of the Supervisor, and we must assume his Deputy, a convicted felon, was improperly seeking to engage the services, illegally, of a consultant to study local fire services (and persuing grant proposals of same) without informing the Greenville Fire Chief, Daniel Raftery. Feiner insisted that Chief Raftery met with Linda Cooper regarding a study to be done by her company. No such communication or meeting ever took place according to Chief Raftery. Hmmm.

About five weeks earlier, as reported by ABG, the Town Assessor received notice of a new surcharge Greenburgh was to be saddled with, resulting in another tax increase to the tax-beleaguered Town residents. This tax increase will affect all local municipalities as well as fire districts, of which there are three, and school districts. The Greenville Fire Commissioners in attendance that evening also denied receiving any notification of this from the Town, in particular the supervisor and/or tax assessor. Then the tax assessor tried to “cover” and said she may have notified the districts’ secretaries. Lisa Georghegan, the GFD secretary, stated that this was not true and she hadn’t received any communication or notice of a tax increase.

ABG would like to quote Mr. Bruckenthal’s letter, obviously, out of context, to highlight what ABG believes is the real issue directly from the Feiner Playbook. “We reiterated at the meeting that fire services do not fall within the town’s authority or scope of operations. Thus, while we all support efficiency in government and encourage efforts by the town to find savings, it is curious and improper that the town’s first instinct is to look outside its own operations to the sovereign municipal fire districts, to find savings. We again urge the town to focus on cutting costs within operations it actually knows and controls. Is the Town so well run that it needs to look outside its own bloated operations to find tax savings efficiencies? If the town wishes to support studies, whether by citizens or paid third party consultants, we suggest it focus its analysis on getting its own house in order.”

Well said. At ABG, we recognize and highlight the inefficiencies as we come across them. We wish we had nothing to report, but sadly our supervisor, unskilled at actually running anything but the campaign for his next election, is slowly grinding our once thriving town into an abyss, a black hole that is swallowing up the businesses and good people, leaving those who can no longer afford to leave.