The Paul’s latest stenographer, Greg Shillinglaw, recently “took a
letter” from his other boss, The Paul. ABG believes he was probably guided to merely rewrite
The Paul’s carefully worded press release and submit it as his own story for
the Sunday edition of the newspaper. No harm, no foul, right? So while The Paul
is touting his “most significant capital budget of his 20-year tenure” to the
tune of $11.9M, the reality is that his budget is a large as it is due to his
actions and a good number of illegal actions.
After continual prodding by the G-10 and others, The Paul
has finally acquiesced and said he would have the Town perform a revaluation. The last time the Town had a revaluation was in the mid-1950’s. Once
he started that mantra, his Stepford Board hopped onto the bandwagon and talked often about it. That was all they did was talk about it. The Paul claimed they were shopping for the best price, hoping to combine the cost with other communities, most notably the City of Yonkers. So even though the entire onus may not have originally been on
The Paul, had he done his due diligence when he was first elected, we wouldn’t be in
such a sorry state of financial straights as we now find ourselves with certiorari refunds. The Paul
has been teasing us with a revaluation/reassessment for several years now. He
even formed a committee. You know how that goes: form a committee to make sure
nothing happens. As long as we‘re at it, let’s appoint convicted felon Alan Hochberg
to head it. So with all of The Paul’s talk of “price-fishing”, Yonkers went ahead without us, Bronxville has completed theirs and Scarsdale is wrapping their revaluations up. Once again, The Paul is all talk, no action.
In a different press release, The Paul obviously bypassed
the Town’s accounting department and began advertising the Town could
save $4+M over twenty years by spending a small fortune in LED light bulbs for Town
light fixtures. Forget that his math was fuzzy by about half the actual amount
we might save. Forget that disposing of currently working light bulbs that have
already been paid for makes no economic sense. Forget that he felt the inflated savings
warranted a major press release and got his news media surrogates to go along
with him. Slow news day perhaps? Nope! When The Paul speaks, they are obliged
to regurgitate it. Curiously, why didn’t they challenge his incorrect numbers
before printing the press release? More importantly, why is Shillinglaw just
going along with whatever The Paul spews?
Continuing, the article quotes The Paul saying, “These are major policy
issues – not just infrastructure improvements.” The Paul is right that they are
policy issues. But to try to combine them even indirectly into infrastructure
improvements is just wrong. The Paul has not allotted money toward any
infrastructure improvements during most of his tenure as Supervisor. And
spending $500k to save $300k is merely reckless wasting of Town resources and
money. What he should be doing is replacing existing light bulbs and light fixtures
to newer LED ones only when the old bulbs or fixtures fail and as necessary. Otherwise,
this is simply a campaign stunt.
The Paul claims to be losing money with the existing
installed water meters and has championed the Town to spend (with
residents ultimately reimbursing) $3.5M to replace every household and business’ water
meter to a new digital, remote reading one. While technology may be great, do
we really want our Town’s water meters constantly broadcasting homeowner’s
information? Given that so many of us are using wireless networks in our homes
and businesses, how might this open us up to a hacker? How easy might it be for a 14-year old to hack into our
information? Or, how about the 30-year old professional hacker and thief? And
even if they cannot break in, will it wreak havoc with our wireless networks and compromise everyones security? Who
will install these new meters and does it now need a power source? There are too many unanswered questions that need to be answered before we proceed.
A while back, 19 laptops were stolen from the Theodore Young
Community Center. The police refused to question everybody and the culprits
were never apprehended. Nor were the computers recovered. To improve security
at the TYCC, The Paul is proposing spending $25k to beef up the security
system. Forget that we are closing the barn door after the laptops were taken.
But, with every other possible expenditure in the budget, this was what The Paul chose to focus upon? This is what
Shillinglaw chose to let The Paul focus on as well! This is nother less than an
abdication of responsibility on the part of both of them. We expect this kind
of chicanery from The Paul. Since the editors at the Journal News allow
Shillinglaw to publish this as news, its apparent they condone the lack of journalism
emanating from their new offices of the Journal News. It’s time for their
reporters and our politicians to be held to a higher standard and stop allowing
this lazy effort to be considered reporting. We can only hope.
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