Reproduced with permission of The Scarsdale Inquirer.
© 2004 S.I. Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Published in The Scarsdale Inquirer on Friday, October 8, 2004
Editorial: A question of answers
Paul Feiner has been subjected to so much criticism in the pages of the
Inquirer and elsewhere recently that it seems he must be running for president - or at least for Congress. But Feiner's not even running for re-election as Greenburgh town supervisor.All the more reason to question why he has raised so much in campaign funds this year - more than four times what he spent on last year's campaign: Some of those donations were the subject of recent stories because they came from developers (or their lawyers) who had applications pending before the town.
Although he publicly promised more than three weeks ago to write the town's ethics board to ask its opinion on the propriety of accepting the donations, Feiner has not done so. We don't know why because he does not answer e-mails or respond to phone messages from our reporter. We can only report what he has previously said - that the donations did not influence him. But everyone in public office knows that it's as important to guard against the appearance of impropriety as it is not to take bribes.
For many years a core group of critics has been challenging Feiner at town board meetings and in letters and op ed pieces. The group is growing and now includes such previously uninvolved Edgemont residents as lawyer Bob Bernstein and former school board president Jim Lasser (who ran against Feiner last year). This week the Edgemont Community Council, representing eight civic associations, asked District Attorney Jeanine Pirro to investigate Feiner's campaign contributions to determine if any laws were broken and if there was any evidence of corruption or influence peddling in the town.
The purchase of the new town hall was perhaps the first controversy to spark the current trend. The town purportedly outbid an Edgemont businessman by $1.4 million for 177 Hillside Ave., site of the new town hall. The disparities in offered prices and methods of valuation (Feiner used
the building's replacement cost) raised eyebrows. Particularly troubling was the revelation that the tax assessor brokered the sale and then offered a tax certiorari to the sellers based on a significantly lower price than the town paid for it. ,Earlier, the town's acquisition of Taxter Ridge, paid for only by unincorporated Greenburgh including Edgemont, dramatized tax rate differences between the unincorporated part of town and the Rivertowns, whose residents live much closer to the park. Edgemonters began to feel that they were paying a disproportionate share of tax dollars for the town entire, a perception that help propel renewed interest in incorporating as a village.
Adding to the sense of unfairness, Edgemont residents learned recently that while only unincorporated Greenburgh is expected to pay for rebuilding the parking garage in Hartsdale, parking fines collected there are currently used to lower taxes for all residents, including those in the Rivertowns.
We believe that dissatisfaction with Feiner is growing in Edgemont and Hartsdale. It's a situation we have reported on but certainly not one we created.
Some readers have written letters complaining that the paper is unfair to Feiner or biased against him. On the contrary, we have always given the supervisor the benefit of the doubt. We have not published all the letters we have received from his critics, and we have insisted that letter writers support their assertions. We publish all letters from his supporters and from Feiner himself.
We investigate the complaints about the supervisor's conduct because it is our obligation to do so, and we report our findings accurately and objectively. We have given him ample opportunity to respond to questions and to present his side, but unfortunately he has reacted as he so often does in town meetings, with petulance rather than openness and cooperation.
We are not trying to destroy Paul Feiner. It is our fervent hope that, rather than hunkering down and trying to ignore or defy his critics, he will pay more attention to the issues they raise and begin to take seriously the impressions of impropriety his actions create.
Meanwhile, we pledge to continue our fair and objective reporting and urge the supervisor and his supporters to take advantage of the public forum this newspaper provides. Everyone loses when the supervisor refuses to talk to reporters.