The Great IDA Hoax: Does IDA Just Apply Lipstick To NR Council’s Pig?

Submitted by Stephen I. Mayo on Tue, 06/22/2010 – 03:30.

Don’t try to read Barry Fertel’s quotations too late at night (or early in the morning). At least for this correspondent, his words pose a real threat to one’s REM sleep patterns, upon which the next day’s generally fragile state of mental acuity is so dependent.

In light of the good Councilmember’s thoroughly consistent and uninterrupted record of voting in favor of any budget, large or small, municipal or educational, stated in rupees or rubles, that has ever fallen within the province of his duties on various coercive legislative bodies for well-nigh fifteen years (!), C.A.V.E. can only stand for “Councilmember Adopting Virtually Every” draft spending plan that the city manager and budget director have ever presented.

It would be refreshing, invigorating even, to hear him (or any other component of the Democrat bobble-headed doll-set presently occupying the council chambers) publicly question just one, single: expenditure, bonding-plan or labor union contract demand. Just one!

The good Councilman, who once informed an assemblage of his fellow School Board members, PTA regulars, FUSE (union) delegates, and the usual assortment of harried taxpayers and social miscreants that he was “a very pro-union guy and very proud to support the teachers’ union and this budget.” This, from a then-Board of Education trustee – a fiduciary of taxpayers and a representative of students and students’ parents, statutorily-charged with guarding the financial interests, investments and infrastructure of the New Rochelle public education system!

Is it any wonder that the State Comptroller (incidentally; a loyal, lifelong Democratic party regular himself!) found it necessary to issue such a stinging report concerning the thorough lack of standards and controls at the New Rochelle Industrial Development Authority? With oversight left in the hands of the likes of public-employee union devotees like Fertel, and board membership held by a City Manager with a constant “thumb” in the making of the municipal budget, and another board seat perpetually occupied by a Councilwoman charged with voting on these very same budgets year-in and year-out, what other result might be expected?

Could a more obvious conflict of interests and a more obvious compromise of professional and oath-derived standards of ethics be imagined?

Never mind questions about the actual number of jobs “retained” or “created” in the process. Those of us who have been following the machinations of Obama’s Great Leap Forward know full-well the creative accounting and anecdotal sleight-of hand that have become the norm among those for whom some economic enterprises (and governmental operations also?) are simply “too big to fail.” By and large, these are problems of definition and semantics, which typify the general overstatement, overestimation and puffery that we have come to expect from the New Class Nobility; the permanent coterie of perpetual public office holders, pension recipients, freeloaders and fourflushers.

No; I am concerned with something much more grave. That is, the trading of development incentives and taxpayer-funded grants, contracts and other benefits for the support of the present and future political campaigns and causes of sitting members of various New Rochelle boards and ruling bodies (need we concern ourselves yet with the independent and ever-growing New Rochelle Public Library and board, its burgeoning, separately voted-upon budget, and its freshly-bloated portfolio of bonded indebtedness?).

The trading that is undertaken behind closed doors, in committee meetings “of-the-whole” or sometimes in committee meetings “of something-less-than-the whole,” shrouded in mystery, blocked from the view of our ever-shrinking daily Journal News and our brave but harried weekly New Rochelle Sound Report, stubbornly resistant to the game FOIL requests of the likes of Talk of the Sound’s editor; and then disingenuously presented to the public as the urban-renewing and job-creating accomplishment of some professional and lawfully-constituted independent body, the IDA (all of this, the city manager’s office has continually reminded us, according to New York State law, and backed by the awesome full faith and solemn full credit of our “august” New York State legislature!).

The time has come for the City Council to commission an independent and full investigation of the practices and procedures of: the New Rochelle IDA, its general membership and particular woefully conflicted members belonging to the city manager’s office and the council itself, with especial attention paid to the glaring absence of candor, accountability and transparency in the gifting of tax abatements, other economic incentives and, other non-economic incentives such as rights to exclusive dealing, Memorandums-of-Understanding etc. granted to the likes of Louis Capelli, Bruce Ratner, their respective companies, and Home Depot and others since the days of Tim Idoni’s operation.

If the Democrat-laden body will not act, may we leave it to the Republican-turned-Democrat County Attorney? Or do we pray for the day when some brave new State Comptroller or authentic crime-busting Attorney General, devoted to upholding traditional notions of civic virtue and public integrity, jumps into the fray?