Charity Begins at (Long Island) Home; Merrick, LI gets more than Massena.  Why?

On August 22, 2010, over five months ago, Street Corner Conservative delivered FOIL requests to NYPA.  The request letter was a mere page and a half and covered few issues: community sponsorships, use of NYPA cars, health insurance provided to NYPA trustees and the like.

The request was short, reasonable and focused.  For instance, the request about health insurance was made because of the work of Attorney General Cuomo to stamp out health insurance provided to authority board members in violation of State law.  Ditto the request about this public authority’s community sponsorships.

During the last five months, NYPA functionaries, at the direction of President and CEO Kessel, have time and again stonewalled Street Corner’s proper FOIL requests and have written several times that the matter is under review.  Well, a few days ago, NYPA spit up a response to the community sponsorships and charitable contribution FOIL request, the contents of which are discussed below.

But why does NYPA intentionally delay responding to citizen requests for information?   Well, Street Corner, like many of its readers, fears for the worst, namely, that Kessel and his minions are possibly stonewalling and denying the public access to information required to be disclosed under State law to hide wrongdoing.  Or perhaps, the answer is that the Kessel-led NYPA is so dysfunctional that this once great agency is unable to comply with the minimum requirements of State law.  We shall see.

Now, for the community sponsorship question.  While NYPA is primarily an upstate agency whose operations are financed from the profits of two huge upstate hydropower plants, Kessel’s charitable largesse begins and ends on Long Island.  Tens of thousands of dollars have gone to Long Island organizations in support of the Kessel PR machine.  A few in particular stick out.  NYPA was one of the biggest contributors to the Merrick Chamber of Commerce in his first full year at NYPA.  Merrick on the South shore of Long Island is served by LIPA and is not a core NYPA territory.  But Richie lives in the hamlet of Merrick.  Mystery solved.

Another questionable sponsorship went to the Chamber of Commerce of the Bellmores.  Bellmore is an affluent South Shore hamlet on Long Island, right next door to Kessel’s hometown.  No NYPA business reason for this.  But the Bellmores were graced with nearly $5,000, what is believed to be far and away the Bellmore Chamber’s largest donation. The Bellmore Chamber has one utility member—not LIPA which serves the area, but NYPA which generates its power hundreds of miles away.

By the way, the Massena Chamber of Commerce received $1,700 from NPYA in 2010.  Street Corner suspects Massena would have done better had Richie lived there.  Here’s the scoreboard:

Finally, why should Massena subsidize Merrick? Street Corner doesn’t see it. In 2009, the average price of a home in Massena was approximately $94,556 as compared to about $306,000 across the State and about $500,000 in Kessel’s Nassau County.  So, this is a case of the Long Islander taking from the less well off to reward his local community.  Kessel is the Reverse Robin Hood.

Here’s more: in 2009, Kessel directed NYPA to give $6,500 to the Fair Media Council, a media watchdog group based on Long Island.  As a result, Kessel was invited as a guest of honor to the Council’s annual “Connection Day” at the Long Island Hilton in Huntington, Long Island and spoke before lots of media people.  In 2009, believe it or not, Kessel was on a panel about twittering.  A year later at the Long Island Hilton in Huntington, Long Island, he moderated a panel on a topic on which he is a true expert– How To Create a Buzz (Without a Budget).  At least when he was a consumer gadfly without portfolio, Kessel spoke to the press without spending taxpayer money  for the opportunity.  (Street Corner will for a moment hold its comment on the CEO of the largest public power utility in the State, a successor to Robert Moses and John Dyson, spending his day orating about twitter and creating buzz for free.)

And another: Kessel had NYPA pay $3,500 so he could be honored on Long Island by a Long Island environmental group in 2009.

In total, Kessel directed at least 16 contributions totaling just under $50,000 of NYPA money to Long Island groups with no known benefit to NYPA.  Street Corner believes that NYPA had never given public money to any of these Long Island groups before Kessel was placed at NYPA by then Governor Paterson.

Here’s why NYPA’s board, regulators and State taxpayers should care. Authority CEOs can’t use public money as their piggybank to make them big men in their communities.  State law requires that there be some clear public purpose to charitable contributions.  Then-Attorney General Cuomo made stamping out wasteful public authority donations a priority.

Compare this with the actions of Kevin Law who succeeded Kessel at LIPA and was charged with cleaning up the Augean mess left by Kessel. In 2007, Law sought a formal opinion from Attorney General Cuomo concerning LIPA’s former (read: Kessel’s) practice of charitable giving and community sponsorships.  The AG determined that the practice of charitable giving of ratepayer funds was not permissible and that community sponsorships with no nexus to the core mission of LIPA should be ended.  Law did exactly that and stopped most LIPA contributions.  Good for him.

What is the nexus of contributions to Richie Kessel’s hometown chambers of commerce with public money? Let’s assume that the people at the Merrick Chamber of Commerce and Bellmore Chamber are good folks, doing good work to beautify the lovely hamlets of Merrick and Bellmore.  Why exactly should the hard-pressed good people of Massena, Niagara and Buffalo subsidize that work? Why should they pay for Kessel to speak to a ballroom full of Long Island reporters on Long Island—something he has done countless times gratis? How did NYPA benefit when NYPA paid Citizens Campaign for the Environment $3,500 so Kessel could be “honored” on Long Island in May 2009? Street Corner has the same questions about each of these Long Island sponsorships. Proving that this is not about NYPA business, the NYPA sponsorship disclosure shows no donation to Holbrook in Suffolk County where NYPA has a small facility.

Street Corner will have more on the charitable contribution scandal as it continues to review this shocking data.  In any event, Street Corner now understands why Kessel and his enablers dreaded releasing this evidence of improper, perhaps illegal, donations and embarrassing material.  The full list of NYPA’s 2009 and 2010 sponsorships will be posted here shortly.

I, Kessel

Last year, Richie Kessel travelled on the NYPA jet to Watertown and appeared before the County Legislature to push his offshore wind project on the people of the North Country.  His performance, part of his desperate attempt to retain his NYPA patronage job was notable for two reasons.  First, during his presentation the good people of Watertown booed Kessel.  Kessel seemed genuinely surprised by the result (why, Street Corner is not sure) but readers can see and hear the booing at around the 9:00 minute mark.  (A link to the video of Kessel’s filibuster is below.)

Just as important, Street Corner Conservative has done its darned best to count the number of times Kessel used the words “I”, “me” and “my”. Our research indicates that Kessel used these terms a staggering 60 times or once every 9 seconds.

In a comical moment, Kessel asserted that the gigantic wind turbines would be a North Country tourist attraction.  That specious and laughable assertion was greeted with guffaws laughs and boos.

Finally, Kessel resorted to the last refuge of the bureaucratic scoundrel by invoking the reliable canard that the public and legislators didn’t know enough about the project because it was preliminary and, as a result, the public should wait till more was known.  The problem with this bogus assertion is that Kessel and NYPA know lots about the project that they are not disclosing and that waiting is what the crafty bureaucrat wants so that when the people awake to an abusive project, it is too late and the project is a fait accompli. Street Corner Conservative believes that Kessel has met his match in the North Country.

Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQABDy2P7IU&feature=email

Asides

Street Corner Conservative thanks its correspondents for their comments and suggestions and leads.  Now, Street Corner requests that you send along questions for Kessel to be asked by NYPA Board members and Senate Energy Committee Chair Senator George Maziarz.  Street Corner intends to compile those and send them along.

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Lastly, where is the NYPA board as all this unfolds?  John Dyson cannot return to the NYPA board soon enough.

The following appears in the January 14-20, 2011 issue of the Long Island Business News:

The Nassau Interim Finance Authority has been much in the news of late due to the county’s fiscal crisis. Because there has been considerable misinformation circulating about NIFA as well as claims that it is only a “so-called watchdog agency,” as a NIFA board member I believe it is appropriate to devote my LIBN column this week to setting the historical record straight.

Back in 2000, to help restore the county’s fiscal health, which had been suffering for years due to mismanagement and corruption, the Nassau County Legislature unanimously approved a home-rule message requesting Albany to create a state oversight panel with the power to guide the county’s budget policies. Both Nassau Legislator Peter Schmitt and then-Legislator Ed Mangano voted for the measure.

Responding to this request, then-Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli, D-Great Neck, and state Sen. Dean Skelos, R-Rockville Centre, crafted NIFA legislation that was intended to fix Nassau’s financial mess and to protect taxpayers from future irresponsible political behavior.

The state Legislature adopted the act to fulfill its constitutional duty “to restrict the power of taxation, assessment, borrowing money, contracting indebtedness and loaning the credit of municipalities so as to prevent abuses in taxation and assessments and in the contracting and loaning of credit by the county.” This visionary bipartisan bill was signed into law by Republican Gov. George Pataki on June 23, 2000.

Modeled on New York City’s Emergency Financial Control Board and the Municipal Assistance Corp. (which were created in the 1970s to address the city’s fiscal nightmare), NIFA is an independent public authority that has had budgetary oversight responsibilities and the power to provide the county with budgetary relief, to transmit state assistance grants and to issue NIFA bonds.

The authority’s governing body consists of seven members who serve without compensation and are appointed by the governor, Senate majority leader, Assembly speaker and the state comptroller. At the present time there is one vacancy.

Most of the public’s attention has been focused on NIFA’s power to declare a “control period” over county finances. Section 3669 of NIFA’s authorizing legislation states NIFA “shall impose a control period upon its determination at any time…. that there is a substantial likelihood and imminence [that] … the county shall have incurred a major operating funds deficit of 1 percent or more in the aggregate results of operations of such funds during its fiscal year assuming all revenues and expenditures are reported in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.”

The phrase “substantial likelihood and imminence” means that NIFA has the authority to impose a control period based on the county’s budget not only when an operating deficit is incurred. In other words, NIFA must declare a control period if it concludes that the county’s budget does not meet the standards to project a balanced budget due to the degree of risk in various projected revenue sources and expects the deficit to be greater than 1 percent, or about $26 million on a budget of $2.6 billion.

If this were ever to occur, NIFA would work with the county in the preparation and implementation of a balanced financial plan. The county’s elected officials would continue to make all policy decisions and maintain direct responsibility for the day-to-day operations of county services. And when it is determined that the budget imbalance has been eliminated, NIFA would lift the control period.

Contrary to all the bombastic rhetoric heard in the public square, NIFA was created at the request of local elected officials in order to provide Nassau County with the opportunity to meet its obligations and to continue to function independently as a municipal entity.

Special State of the State Edition

 Happy Days are Here Again!

The long and storied history of the Power Authority has been written by great men such as Robert Moses and John Dyson under the leadership of Governors such as Al Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Tom Dewey, Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo.

Sadly, the leadership of NYPA has been recently debased and reached new lows as its current CEO and President has dismantled what was once one of the greatest public utilities in the nation and incurred the ire of customers, elected officials and NYPA’s workforce.

But the inauguration of Governor Andrew Cuomo has brought new hope to the customers of NYPA and taxpayers of the State. Yesterday, Governor Cuomo announced that he had nominated John Dyson for another term as NYPA board member. Dyson’s nomination is subject to Senate confirmation but that is expected to be pro forma.

After talking with its correspondents in Albany, White Plains and Long Island, here’s what Street Corner Conservative foresees—

First, Dyson, a former NYPA Chair who has held many important posts in the US Army, and State and New York City governments, surely did not accept the Governor’s offer to be just another board member. We expect that Dyson will be named NYPA Chair next month.

Street Corner believes that Kessel was able to thwart the gullible Governor Paterson from appointing Dyson during Paterson’s thankfully completed term. In fact, Kessel was able to convince Paterson to make a holdover Pataki appointee NYPA Chair. Kessel pushed Paterson to install the Pataki holdover knowing that a grateful Michael Townsend would not question his hijinks.

Second, Street Corner believes that Kessel, who was spotted in Albany Wednesday—the day of Governor Cuomo’s first State of the State address—leaving the Governor’s office, was informed that Dyson was coming in and Richie would soon leave.

If as Street Corner expects, this happy news is soon confirmed, the promise of the new Cuomo Administration will be bright indeed for NYPA.

Street Corner invites its correspondents to send in information on what may be the last days of the Kessel reign.