Data on police: a great step to reform

beethoven summer 2015

Frogs out!

They are here!

Every year I note the night the peepers, frogs, come out. It's a very clear marker of spring, as all the frogs come out at once -- once one male frog starts singing for a mate, the others come right out and join in so it goes from quiet one night to loud the next night. It is loud right now.

Although it seems like this has been an endless winter, in fact, the frogs came out later last year. 

Here are 8 years of first nights.

2015: April 3
2014: April 6
2013: March 30
2012: March 12
2011: March 17
2010: March 19
2009: March 27
2008: April 1

Ginsberg's Project: it doesn't fit

Below (click "read more") is the short version of all that is wrong with this project. Here is the more detailed version.

Free land, free money, variances that allow the company to flaunt the zoning laws: this deal is bad and there is a meeting tonight.

Then, another: Wednesday, September 17, at the Ghent firehouse at 10 AM. Very important meeting for all Columbia County residents.

Also, I never did blog the payroll meeting but this article is damn good.

Let your voice be heard at both. Read more.

Crony Capitalism at its Worst

Below I offer more details on this sorry Ginsberg deal. Here is the shorter version. Meeting tonight.

Wednesday, Sept. 10th at 7pm at Ghent Town Hall

"PLEASE TAKE NOTICE THAT the Zoning Board of Appeals of the Town of Ghent will hold a regular meeting on 9/10/2014 at 7pm at the Town Hall, 2306 Route 66, Ghent, NY at which time the applications by Ginsberg/Crawford & Associates for variances/code interpretation will continue to be reviewed."

Report from the Columbia Paper from the last ZBA meeting "Ghent Residents give freezer plan frosty critique"

public trust?

From the audit:

Payroll Department on November 14, 2013 via email identifying 37 leave days to be deducted from the resigning attorney’s accruals, the email was not opened before the separation payment was issued on November 21, 2013. 

It should be noted that we found the discrepancies in this department because it was the only department that had sufficient records to test. Such records consisted of leave request forms and an electronic calendar that documented daily absences. 

The public trust is endangered when records of leave time earned and used are not maintained and separation payments made are not fully supported. 

What do 26 hour days do to public trust? How about 5 guys maintaining private law offices with staff while simultaneously claiming to be present at 401 State Street for years when they don't have desks at 401 State and never went there?

Grattan is obliged by law to deal with this by law and can't say "whoops!." If crimes were committed, hundreds of felonies for years by many people, the DA has an obligation to prosecute and the state police have an obligation to arrest.

comptroller audit meeting tomorrow

Special meeting of BOS 9/4/14, 5:30pm, to review Columbia County Payroll Audit

 NOTICE OF SPECIAL MEETING OF THE BOARD OF ... 2014 at 5:30 pm in the Board of Supervisors Chambers located at 401 State Street, ...

Here is an interesting passage from the audit:

an amendment

I get a lot of fundraising emails about overturning the Citizen's United decision that gutted election laws and gave free speech rights to corporations. I followed the most recent fundraising email here. Here is another. One more here. Last one to prove there are a lot.

comptroller article in the Register Star

http://www.registerstar.com/news/article_e20a0f74-2bf6-11e4-adce-001a4bcf887a.html#user-comment-area

The thing is, it's way more than $40,000, as that is only for 18 months including the time after the story ran on the front page of the Albany Times Union.

whitewash

I no sooner wrote this abstract piece about the police when Sam Pratt told me to read this. I'm upset. It's a whitewash.

I'm going to get a copy of the report and every document I can pertaining to the production of this report. If you steal a million dollars it's not "oh well, we'll try to do better next time."

DiNapoli in there for the cronies. Democrats and Republicans united in corruption.

the police

The protests and unrest and police misconduct in Ferguson, Missouri makes me think about policing generally. Here are my thoughts:

schneiderman: columbia county is worse

http://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-announces-arrest-and-four-count-indictment-broome-county-attorney-john

This is peanuts compared to Sleepergate. Why not Columbia County?

july 4, 1776, pluses and minuses

American Independence may in part be something to celebrate. If Edmund Burke, the arch conservative, Ben Franklin, the arch moderate, and Tom Paine, the arch radical, could all agree on the need for the Americans to break away from the British, then they must have a point. No doubt, the English were heavy handed. True, fundamentally, the English did seem to have a point that the American should pay at least a fraction of the taxes that the people back in England had to pay in order to cover the costs of defending the colonies from the French and Indians. Still, the war was justified due to the lack of compromise on the English side.

But was American independence good or bad?  It's hardly a slam dunk either way. Let's think about a few things:

second home owners: Columbia County's main industry

Sam Pratt has a story up about Ginsberg getting 33 acres for free from Columbia County. I was having trouble getting on his blog a few minutes ago but it should be back up soon.

frogs

Frogs, frogs, frogs....

I won

Hello,

I won an appeal, Freedom of Information request against Columbia County. 

The county is hiding evidence that they have many no show, fake jobs. The most obvious, as ran on the front page of the Albany Times Union, involves the felony larceny of Tal Rappleyea. 

Rappleyea routinely billed in excess of 24 hours per day. He was paid by municipalities without submitting as much as a scrap of paper. The comptroller knows about it and refuses to investigate. The attorney general claims no jurisdiction. The local DA Czajka promoted Rappleyea as prosecutor in one town AFTER acknowledging Rappleyea's criminality in a meeting. The state police refuse to act. Pat Grattan, chair of the CCBOS, knows this practice of theft, millions stolen, continues even now. 

Rappleyea is not alone. New Lebanon paid Andrew Howard 24,000 for 45 minutes of "work." That works nicely with his fake county job.

Paul Czajka's secretary was Rappleyea's wife and he refuses to get off the case. Some more background here. 

http://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/ad3/Decisions/2014/516119.pdf

http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Attorney-math-1-day-26-hours-4026701.php

Oh, and I have an art opening next week and some classes for children and teens around town. Knowledge is power and all that, democracy, etc. 

bullcrap

The supreme court voided campaign contributions limits.

Meanwhile, the top .1 percent of the country in wealth controls 12% of the nation's wealth, which is about the same as the bottom 50%, on in other words, some 30 thousand people have as much wealth as 160 million people.

In short, that's ridiculous. Morally, economically, environmentally, democratically-- in no way is that a good thing, to give a small group of people so much power over the rest of us.

One dollar, one vote. I mean it's just bullcrap.

baby!

Viola, born in Hudson

all the docs

This went over to opposition counsel as the federal suit moves forward. 1200 pages and a few gigabytes too, of course.

too much garbage!

I have to follow up on this. When is the final decision coming? And then there is this.

here's how things look today in upstate New York (glencadia hamlet)

international law

This article says American foreign policy is arrogant and Obama is a huge disappointment. This article is about the terrible abuses in North Korea. This wikipedia page is about the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1951. This disgraceful law is emblematic of US paranoid nationalism. In this piece, Abdulrahman's grandfather points out that Barack Obama killed a 16 year old boy in cold blood for no coherent reason (and many other people) on October 14, 2011 and has kept it up since then.

dogs, snow, valentine's day