Town Screws Up Again – Costs Us Millions – Again!

After Paul Feiner was found guilty of discrimination, destroying evidence and five other counts against him in the Fortress Bible Church of Mt Vernon, NY case, “he” had to pay a fine of $6.5 million dollars. In reality, he paid nothing and got off “Scott free.” Although he aways insisted the insurance company would pay the fine prior to the verdict, we soon learned that the insurance company did not have to pay the full amount, contrary to what non-practicing attorney Feiner insisted. Why? Because there was a clause in the policy (loosely interpreted) that relieved the insurance company from that entire obligation because Mr Feiner had been found guilty in Federal Court of the charges, negating that contract. So, the insurance company paid only $1 million dollars and Greenburgh taxpayers, not Mr Feiner, are paying the $5.5 million dollars difference!

It seems that even though the discrimination book is not yet closed on this despicable act by Mr Feiner and his Town Board at the time, another costly settlement has been underway for approximately 5 or so years. Now a settlement has finally been reached and resulted in another multi-million dollar payout by the Town. S&R Development Estates, which acquired the 2.3-acre property at 1 Dromore Road to build a 45-unit apartment complex in 2006, based upon a mapping error by the Town, filed suit against the Town and won, resulting in another massive payout by the Town for $9.5 Million dollars.

The Town Board was advised numerous years ago that there was a discrepancy with the Zoning maps for Dromore Road and that they should be corrected before a developer seeks to purchase the property and build something in the neighborhood, vis é vis the Town, that the surrounding area residents might not want. Well, as sure as Mr Feiner is proof of why we need term limits, S&R Development Estates purchased the property to develop as multi-family housing. And while Mr Feiner has consistently failed to stand up for most neighborhoods and always sides with the developer du jour, here’s yet another example of how he failed the other property owners on Dromore Road, specifically the Green­burgh Na­ture Cen­ter, whose largely wooded 33-acre prop­erty abuts the lot in question, the Sis­ters of the Blessed Sacra­ment, a Catholic or­der whose sanc­tu­ary also bor­ders the prop­erty, and res­i­dents of the un­in­cor­po­rated com­mu­nity of Edge­mont, and the Town residents in general. 

S&R later sold the prop­erty to Wilder and Bal­ter Prop­er­ties of Chap­paqua. They are a de­vel­oper spe­cial­iz­ing in af­ford­able and work­force hous­ing, which is probably what they plan to build on this site. Unfortunately, affordable and workforce housing is just a moniker for low income and/or subsidized housing and the issues that follow it. But those issues will soon belong to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the Greenburgh Nature Center and the Edgemont residents whether they incorporate or not.

So whose at fault with all of this? Mostly Mr Feiner and his current and former Town Board members, Francis Sheehan, Diana Juettner, Eddie Mae Barnes and Steve Bass, as they were made aware of the inaccuracies in zoning and chose to do nothing to correct it. And, once they eventually did try to take action, it was simply too late – and ultimately too costly. The Town Board de­cided to limit the li­a­bil­ity to res­i­dents of un­in­cor­po­rated Green­burgh and not the six vil­lages, in­clud­ing the River­towns (as always). “Since this is a land use mat­ter and the vil­lages have their own land use boards,” said Mr Feiner, “I don’t think it would be fair to have the vil­lages con­tribute.” What Mr Feiner really means is that the Village voters are the people who have kept him in office this long and he doesn’t want to take a chance of alienating them - especially now that he has a challenger for this election! He also failed to mention that the Village’s Mayors and Trustees actually do an infinitely better job of protecting their residents from developers than he has ever done. It must be nice…

If incompetence were ever to go mainstream, its model would be right here in the Town of Greenburgh with any of the career politician Feiner’s administrations. Would a Town run by his challenger, who worked in the failed NYC DiBlasio administration, be any better? Highly doubtful. The Republicans ceded the Town to the Democrats long ago and now they are bearing those fruits at an incredible cost to us all. Electing “more of the same” from the Democrat pork barrel puts at fault those same people, an established one-party, poorly ruled Town. This must change. It’s the only way we’ll get A Better Greenburgh.

Happy Father’s Day

 

Moving The Greenburgh School District Forward

The School Board trustee elections and the School Budget vote have been completed, and a new Superintendent hired despite the sabotaging of an offer made to another candidate, it’s time for the School District’s Board of Education to get down to business. 

To do this, all “sides” must be able to bury their campaign animosities and work as one, even as the distractions of the current Board are still in the forefront. Specifically, the hearing to remove 18-year School Board Trustee Terry Williams, who coincidentally, lost in this past election. Obviously, the writing is on his wall since the public has seen through his antics and decided, “No more.” 

As they say in those infomercials on TV, “But wait there’s more...”

 

During the campaigning portion of the elections, a group known as the Friends of Greenburgh (FOGs) campaigned to maintain the status quo. Specifically, they continued seeking campus consolidation even after that proposed construction bond had been defeated by a nearly two-to-one vote. They also continued fight to extend the expiring contract of Superintendent Chase, despite the serious flaws in her performance. An unofficial (yet apparent) icon for the FOGS was School Board Trustee Terry Williams, who has been entrenched as a School Board trustee for 18 years! He exemplifies a valid reason for term limits! 

Currently, Mr Williams is the focus of a hearing to have him removed from the School Board for failing to adhere to the School Board rules and regulations as well as NY State Department of Education’s laws for School Board members. Specifically, it’s alleged that he, in addition to ongoing disrespect of otherBoard members and possible assault, disclosed privileged information from an Executive Session meeting about an employee to that employee!

 

As the School Board awaited a plan from the Superintendent to get students back into the schools, that became almost impossible. What kind of motivation to get the kids back into the classroom would the soon-to-be-terminated Superintendent have when she knows that she's going to lose her job? So, as time dragged on, so did the submission of a return-to-classroom plan. Most people don't realize that a “return to school” plan must be developed by the Superintendent and then submitted to the School Board for approval, followed by implementation. 

Leading up to the elections, the FOGs continued to push their “status quo” agenda by attempting to disparage the current Board members, utilizing a series of negative attacks on various social media channels. The one thing that the FOGs did get correct was about the drive and determination by Dr Tanya Dragic, one of the latest Board members who was elected along with Ashley Pineda two years ago. Dr Dragic made many claims during her campaign about what she intended to do to try to improve the Board’s operation, the student’s grades, condition of the District’s schools and optimizing the budget wherever and whenever possible. Mr Pineda has not been as vociferous as Ms Dragic and seemingly not as assiduous or as open in attempting to improve this Board. Perhaps his is simply a different style, but we hope that he is as committed in making improvements. Hopefully he agrees with what the Board has been striving for under the leadership of President Antoinette Darden-Cintron. 

This Board continues to struggle at Board Work sessions, Executive sessions and Regular Public sessions. This struggle is largely due to an amalgamation of issues maintained by Mr Williams, the Superintendent, and to a lesser degree David Warner who had aligned himself with Mr Williams. Their splintered agenda has prevented the current Board from moving the bar forward and improving the education of our District’s children. The Greenburgh school district has floundered with poor choices for Superintendents for so long, it would be a Herculean task to get our schools back on track even without having outside and inside forces that are counter-productive to improving our buildings and the instruction for our children. 

We all know that this otherwise problematic mix has been exacerbated by the pandemic which effectively shut down our kids learning for more than a year. Parents, as well as doing their own jobs while forced to work from home, had to oversee schooling their children. Other parents even had to quit their jobs to stay home with their children as they were unable to work from home. It’s safe to say that teachers will no longer need to discuss why little Johnny is doing poorly in school during parent-teacher nights. They now know first hand how their child behaves and performs in school. 

But wait, there’s more.

A recent FaceBook-looking post appeared to come from the School Board entitled, “GCSD BOE Whats [sic] Going On,” with a sub-headline, “You Never Know What You [sic] Got Until Its [sic] Gone.” In this post, posted anonymously, the writer states that they just watched the appointment of Superintendent Chase to the Westbury Union Free School District and it was nothing short of a coronation. Her Greenburgh “accomplishments” were touted and all the school board members voted in favor to hire her. Apparently, they were not dismayed by our 35% Math and English scores on state assessments, the failed International Baccalaureate program, the failed Mandarin program, or the exodus of students from our public schools to private and parochial schools. 

The post is so similar to the complaints voiced repeatedly by Mr. Williams through the years, one can’t help but believe that he penned this piece. The writer touts the numerous references to these supposedly heralded programs as stated by Mr. Warner at this same Westbury School Board meeting. Huh? Mr. Warner is certainly within his legal right to speak on behalf of anyone although we believe his attendance and remarks at the Westbury Board meeting was an ethically poor choice.  He is still a GCSD Board member and, as such, he should have kept his opinions to himself.

The writer also refers to first-time Board member Tanya Dragic as the “puppet master” of the Board. Such a ridiculous statement belittles the other 5 hardworking and independent thinking Board members. (Did we not say before that he is charged with being disrespectful to fellow Board members?) What Ms Dragic did was question the actions taken regarding the consolidation bond effort and to fight the dream upon which Mr Williams has staked his entire 18 year school board tenure. Regardless of whether you consider Mr Williams a visionary or loose cannon, the public voted down the consolidation bond with a nearly two-to-one margin once the true facts and monetary figures were divulged. The public, who are the TRUE Friends of Greenburgh, made the requisite effort to provide the due diligence that neither the Board nor the FOG's bothered to do. So while the writer on FB states that, “(the bond) came closer to passing with more interest and support than the previous three bonds floated...” it was still once again resoundingly defeated. Instead of acknowledging the will of the community and moving on, certain community and Board members and the Superintendent choose to insist that the bond was defeated because they did a poor job of selling it to us. What really happened is that they underestimated the intelligence of the taxpaying public who have been passing school budgets each year in a show of support of our schools. 

The writer then moves on to malign newly elected Trustee Kiana Washington by making false claims that she had been fired as a school administrator. This simply is not true. The rest of the diatribe that the writer rambles on about could be capped as the season finale of the TV show Fringe. 

Now that Mr Williams will be departing and three new Trustees will join the School Board, let’s hope they will all work together, along with our newly appointed Superintendent, for the betterment of the education of our children, the betterment of our school buildings , and the betterment of our School Board and District.  We pay a tremendous amount of money for the education of our children. Let’s make it pay off. It’s how we’ll get A Better Greenburgh School District.

Greenburgh’s E-Waste Pickup Week of June 14th

 The Town of Greenburgh is doing another e-waste pickup but you must make an appointment by Wednesday June 9th. You can schedule that by clicking on this link:

 https://widgets.recollect.net/r/area/GreenburghNY/waste?#