24 August 2004
Peyton Randolph
Giambra miscounts and Naples goes AWOL
From the beginning of the Giambra Administration, there have been whispers about the way the county executive and the people around him have run county government.
Some substance is gradually becoming clear, particularly the fiscal black hole the county has been pushed into. That will become really clear when the budget arrives this fall, probably with a massive property tax hike and possibly with a raise in the sales tax to 9% or possibly both.
It isn’t just Giambra’s fault, because he inherited the Medicaid mess and Albany seems determined to deal with those ever-rising costs by making the local taxpayers pick up the tab. Where Giambra started to create the expanded mess was his cavalier campaign promise to cut property taxes.
He used that in his re-election campaign. Then, he started to spend a lot of money. Some was silly and certainly borderline Penal Law, like millions spent for office furniture. Some may have been needed, although the new Public Safety Building downtown shows signs of an edifice complex. There’s also the expansion of the county highway budget, and that’s where criminal activity has been found and more is rumored.
The difficulty is that the money to pay for everything had to come from somewhere and that’s where the new county grand jury report is so fascinating in its discussion of voodoo budgeting. The report also is interesting because it says so little about what was going on in the County Legislature, a body still essentially controlled by the Administration, even though it currently has a Democratic majority.
There’s also the mention of one legislator (unnamed) who reacted to allegations of a whistleblower by turning over the information to the administration and getting the employee screwed over.
There’s also the issue of County Comptroller Nancy Naples, the “fiscal watchdog.” The grand jury portrays a fiscal management system run amuck, paying no attention to rules, regulations and laws governing budgeting, purchasing and payroll, heavily in the Public Works Department.
It is hard to believe that’s the only department where the rules and the system failed to overlap. The bills were paid and the paychecks were honored and no one noticed, even the woman whose office was supposed to notice.
The Buffalo news did its best not to notice either, relying on creating a public image that Giambra was a fresh idea in government, not the well-dressed hack he really is.
The county paid its bills by pissing away tens of millions of dollars delivered when the county “monetized” the proceeds of a successful lawsuit against the tobacco industry.
There isn’t much left, although the total isn’t clear.
The grand jury delivered a fascinating look at two of the most important women in county government, Naples and Public Works Commissioner Maria Lehman.Naples seems to have been absent without leave for years, during the fiscal free-for-all portrayed by the grand jury. And now she’s using her service as comptroller as a major plus in her effort to replace Jack Quinn in Congress.
Lehman is portrayed as a commissioner in the middle between an administration which seemed to see her as little more than a nuisance and a staff which saw her as a woman deserving no attention. The report suggests she tried to do something, including a public screaming encounter with Giambra and secret probes to find out what her subordinates were keeping from her.
As the grand jury portrayed the mess in December 2002, one medium level official was being investigated by the FBI and with major cojones sued Lehman. “For the commissioner, that was the last straw. On December 11, 2002, the commissioner went to the County Executive and, in a voice heard throughout the adjoining offices, demanded that something be done.”
In a e-mail memo the next day to the administration on the Rath Building’s 16th floor which was produced to the grand jury, she blasted the way things are done under Joel Giambra, “[Employee] has no respect for me and that is reinforced by the fact that every time he cries to 16 and I have to agree to be nice and play on the team (which I have done to the breaking point) while he agrees to play on the team and then doesn’t. We have been successful in keeping these issues low-key, but I think with re-election next year, some of these issues will hit the street and it will hurt the administration. I have had several conversations with [administration official] on this.”
The grand jury report said the particular employee discussed here had “diplomatic immunity” or was a beneficiary of the “friends and family plan” openly discussed in county government because of personal ties to Giambra and his official family.
Because of the hapless and ill-financed campaign run by Dan Ward during the re-election campaign, little of this came out other than the whispers and rumors Giambra has complained about.
Now, Giambra says it’s time to move on.
There are a series of problems in “moving on.”
One is that most of the same people who went out of their way to try to cover up the mess and protect people are still around.
Another is the tarnishing effect on the way county government is supposed to run, when those at the top openly avoid the rules.
Did others take their cues from what everyone knew was going on in the Public Works Department? Did these same things go on in other departments without being yet noticed? That’s seems to be what happened in personnel operations, where test results were ignored and the rules for promotion tests were altered to protect the favored.
The taxpayers are going to pay for the fiscal games and pay heavily.Will others? Will Naples move up to Congress based on her AWOL status as the fiscal watchdog? Will Giambra move up to a state or federal government position from his launching pad in the Public Works Department?
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.