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Health & Fitness

Autumn Leaves and Highway Robbery

Invoices show possible 'Highway Robbery' of taxpayers' funds by numerous vendors. Instead of conducting a routine audit, Supervisor Gromack and Finance Head, Sullivan, are dealing with an 'anomaly' starting up the Town's 'Leaf Vacuums'.

Customer: I would like to have my leaves picked up, please.Part-time Phone Rep: I could help you with that but you would need to sign an absentee ballot.Customer: Isn't that Highway Robbery?

Autumn Leaves .....
The falling leaves drift by my window. The autumn leaves of red and gold.

Reading a recent article in New City Patch I learned that Highways Superintendent, Wayne Ballard, had apparently suffered a panic attack when the first leaf of autumn drifted by his window. The Department's leaf vacuuming equipment wasn't needed last year and Ballard has become convinced it may not start up this year and be ready for operation by November 4th.  

Patch reportedThe two candidates for Clarkstown Superintendent of Highways (Dennis Malone and Wayne Ballard) differ over the readiness of equipment to collect leaves. The Highway Department’s Fleet Manager, Dennis Malone, who reports to the Town Board, insisted all the necessary equipment will be serviced and ready to go for leaf collection season. “We are actively getting all that equipment ready,” said Malone. “Ballard wants it ready by November 4th and it will be.

Ballard, however, having noticed a falling leaf back in mid-August apparently wrote an e-mail about that rare sighting and said that he was concerned about the readiness of the Town's leaf vacuum equipment. 

Patch continued: This disagreement caused the town's Director of Finance John Sullivan to intervene and meet with them and Deputy Highway Superintendent Andrew Lawrence.  Gromack described the situation as "a bit of an anomaly - we get one side from Mr. Malone - we get one side from Mr. Ballard.” Sullivan said Ballard is "anxious" about the department’s preparedness for leaf season and they reviewed all his concerns. “We’re confident everything will be ready for leaf season,” said Sullivan, who will continue to monitor the preparation.   
Finance Director Sullivan should perhaps ask if Ballard's part-time phone service representative, Legislator Sparaco, could make himself available to gas up the leaf vacuuming equipment and crank their engines over to put his boss's mind at rest assuming, of course, he is no longer occupied videotaping his colleagues conversations and collecting absentee ballotsAfter all at the Town Board meeting on October 01, 2013 Ballard claimed that Sparaco's part-time productivity "filled the void left by the elimination of 15 people back eleven years ago in 2002". Thus relieved of this burden on the Finance Director created by the non-problem of the leaf vacuums, Sullivan could direct his attention to some finance matters in the Highway Department that in the long run may prove much more important to taxpayers and voters than autumn leaves drifting by Ballard's windows.

Highway Robbery 
.....
Robber: Hand over your money.
Victim: Idiot! I am Wayne Ballard, the Highways Superintendent
Robber: Oh, in that case hand over my money.

At a Workshop Meeting on September 24, 2013 Clarkstown Fleet Manager, Dennis Malone, gave a report to the Town Board showing that in the past five years before he took over operations of the three Town garages, Ballard had spent $550,000 per year on average for parts and outside repairs in the Highway Garage. This year Malone reduced that garage's cost to $250,000

Malone produced several examples of charges which Ballard had approved to illustrate how he has been able to knock $300,000 off the bill taxpayers are footing to pay vendors for work and parts supplied in the past to the Town's Highway Department.  

Superintendent Ballard disputed these savings saying that they were "incorrect" but he seemed unable to make any progress with his claim since the numbers had been taken from a spreadsheet provided by the Town Comptroller and were not generated by Malone. Supervisor Gromack eventually asked the representative of the Comptroller to offer a comment.  She replied that their latest numbers showed that the savings Malone had achieved might actually be greater than the $300,000 he was outlining to the Town Board. 

Malone then discussed several examples of fairly common garage supplies such as anti-freeze and transmission oil that appear to show fiscal mis-management by the present Highways Superintendent, Ballard. 

Consider these five charges to the Town of Clarkstown's Highway Department .....

1) American Hose & Hydraulics the Open Bid Vendor quoted a Mailhot Cylinder on July 24, 2013 for $3,118.  Two quotes were sought by Malone from FluidPower and Utica Mack. The average of the two quotes was $1,908

2) A 55 gallon drum of Transmission Oil from the Open Bid Vendor was $2,501.  The average of two other vendors for transmission oil meeting the same specifications was $1,327.

3) The Open Bid VendorFleet Pride of Atlanta, Georgia, charges $444 for 55 gallons of anti-freeze.  Partner Supply Corporation of Stony Point quoted $231.

4) Mark's Onsite Truck & Equipment Repair charged $798 for a valve block to repair the Menzi Muck unit. A direct quote from the supplier prices the part at $315. On the same invoice the Town was charged labor at $130 per hour for five days of repair work at a total labor cost of $5,395.

5) Mark's Onsite Truck & Equipment Repair charged $5,750 for an Upper Joystick for the Menzi Muck. A direct quote from the supplier prices the part at $2,706.

All of the documents from which these numbers were obtained were examined by a financial executive and a certified public accountant both of whom concluded that an audit was necessary of the Highway Department's past expenditures as a prudent and routine measure. 

When questioned at the Workshop by Tom Nimick and myself as to whether Mark's Onsite Truck and Repair is run by an ex-employee of the Town and over the past few years has apparently billed the Town for over $500,000 of services, Ballard's answer was not forthcoming. Yet he and his 'executive assistant', Nancy Willen, had attended the ex-employee's wedding a few days before. Pressed further for a definitive answer to my question Ballard confirmed, what a member of the public had already proffered, that the person in question was indeed an ex-employee of the Town. 

Questioned to explain the $3,000 difference between the price charged and the price quoted for the Menzi Muck Upper Joystick, Ballard replied mysteriously that had the Town Board provided him with $3,000 he would have shipped the excavator back to the dealer for repair

What that response had to do with the question about the apparent overcharge could not be explored as the Workshop was promptly adjourned to permit members of the Town Board to abandon their own fiscal responsibilities and rush over to Clarkstown South High School where they participated in a contentious meeting about a collapsing wall in the Congers School.  

Upon arrival, four of them lined up behind their part-time employee, Legislator Sparacoto publicly lecture the School Board members on the Town Board's perceived ineptitude of how they were managing the School budget. However, not one of them offered to return the $1.5 million dollars they took from Congers and other taxpayers by placing a 1% fee on the School Tax bill in 2012 for the purpose of "collecting the school taxes" from those seated in the auditorium. 

Legislator Sparaco
 berated the members of the School Board with tales of his service in the bowels of a navy ship on the high seas, the relevance of which to the financial woes of the School Board floated past me in the evening fog. Truth be told politicians say wacky things in off-season election years and even wackier things in election years. 

Sparaco then resumed a conversation at the back of the auditorium with ex-Clarkstown patronage employee, Jay Savino, who was arrested by the FBI for corruption while employed by Supervisor Gromack to conduct the Town's tax certiorari work. Ironically, it was Savino who had "sat in" on the court discussions which led to the Town losing $20 millions in a tax case to the Palisades Mall. The loss emptied the School Board's reserve funds and had precipitated the crisis in the School Board's fiscal woes that was being discussed that very evening on the 'high seas' of Clarkstown South's auditorium.  

Whether Savino inquired from Sparaco if he was hoping to retain his own patronage job in the Town's Highway department under Ballard after the November election must remain a matter of wry speculation. 

Meanwhile, as the Town Board members remain in a dither about a school budget over which they have no control, the rest of us must acknowledge (if the Town Board's attention ever returns to the matter at hand) that prices for parts do fluctuate over time. These vendor charges, and particularly those from Marks's Onsite Truck and Repair, may be perfectly legitimate. Yet there appears to be ample concern, given the magnitude of the apparent mark-up in the costs of parts supplied by numerous vendors and the evasiveness of Mr. Ballard's responses about the ownership of Mark's Onsite Truck and Repair, that the Highway department's expenditures need to be audited. 

The payments made on the Menzi Muck are particularly troubling examples of alleged overcharging of the Town's Highway Department given a previous discussion by the Town Board on the problems associated with the Menzi Muck and Ballard's poor management in attempting to keep this 'lemon' operational.

The history is that six months ago Ballard took issue with Malone over the repair and servicing of this piece of excavation equipment. Patch reported that a dispute arose over the operational capability and expense of this equipment and that Malone had stated bluntly that in his opinion the 'Menzi Muck A61excavator should never have been purchased by Ballard in the first place; it is made in Switzerland and the only dealer able to service it is in Florida.

Malone was quoted further in Patch as saying: "Ballard spent approximately $76,000 to repair the Menzi Muck in 2012 and by his own admission, it is only worth $24,000. The sad part is that the machine was never fixed to begin with".

The facts are that Ballard purchased a piece of Swiss equipment at over a quarter of a million dollars that didn't function properly and he had no idea how to keep it functional.  It might have been better if you the taxpayers were not informed of this fact or that Clarkstown has not been alone in its difficulties in keeping the Menzi Muck A61 running. Ballard allowed the Menzi Muck to become an expensive money sink for repairs preferring to "ship it out" to have it "fixed". Malone wanted to follow the wisdom of other Town's that purchased this 'white elephant' by cutting the losses immediately and getting rid of it. Ballard, while confessing that a trade-in would bring only about $20,000 claims "it's an important piece of equipment but we need to do much more "research" on this. 

Supervisor Gromack asked Finance Director John Sullivan to work on the problem with Ballard and Malone which suggested that the Supervisor was unaware of the Town of Harrison's experience with this excavator. A simple Google search turned up the following article in the Harrison Patch which states:

"
Deciding to cut its losses and move on, the Harrison Town Board has voted to sell a Menzi Muck excavator originally purchased for $243,000 to a municipality in New Jersey for $90,000. The machine, purchased in 2007, was intended work on streams and brooks to battle flooding. Considered state of the art at the time, the machine has sat idle for four years because of technical problems and a lack of (trained) manpower to use it. After the board voted to accept bids to sell the machine in 2011, offers topped at $40,000. Earlier this spring Woodbridge, NJ, offered $90,000 for the piece of machinery and Harrison accepted the offer on Feb. 29. "We decided to let it go rather than hold on to it longer and who knows, we might have lost more money," said Harrison Mayor/Supervisor Ron Belmont.

Mr. Sullivan, as the Town's finance director, should now turn his attention away from issues associated with how to start up the Town's Vacuums and turn his attention to what the taxpayers are paying him to do - determine if cash is being vacuumed out of the Town's Highway department by the Town's Vendors

At the October 2013 meeting of the Town Board with this in mind, I called upon the board to move a motion that as a prudent and routine measure an audit be conducted immediately of all of the charges billed to the Town's Highway department over the past five years to determine why $300,000 of annual savings in the one particular area of vendor bids could be achieved so easily when the previous five year average had shown expenditures of over $550,000.

Apparently this audit will have to wait until after the November election for which Ballard's $75,000 part-time phone representative, Frank Sparaco, will be working in Ballard's own words "nights and weekends to insure my re-election" and, of course, the phone rep's own continued employment. 

Ironically, if Ballard is indeed re-elected we may never get to know the true cost of transmission oil and anti-freeze to the Town of Clarkstown. 

This blog is authored by Michael N. Hulla retired senior citizen who writes opinion pieces on local political issues. He is a Director of Clarkstown Residents Opposing Patronage with Tom Nimick and Ralph Sabatini.  Hull contributes periodically to the Facebook page Clarkstown: What They Don't Want You To Know and on Twitter. 

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