The insurance carrier that underwrites the Saratoga Springs Fire Department’s vehicles (it may cover more items) has notified the city that due to a failure to pay its bill, the city’s policy will be canceled on November 8, 2023.
I do not know who was responsible for this screw-up, but since the notice was sent to Risk and Safety, one reasonably suspects that the City Assistant Attorney, Michael Phillips, who Mayor KIm has put in charge of Risk and Safety, may be the responsible party.
Saratoga Springs Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi’s proposed 2024 budget is a profoundly flawed document that raises taxes and raids the city’s fund balance (currently $3,000,000.00) while also not appropriately funding important needs of the city. It exposes her chronic inability to do the hard analysis required to ensure the proper functioning of our city.
In the following clip, Sanghvi asserts that the reason the city budget is so problematic is because of three factors:
People who follow this blog know that as a result of the breakdown of the Risk and Safety Department, Travelers Insurance will no longer underwrite the city. A careful scrutiny of Sanghvi’s proposed budget reveals that Sanghvi has had to allocate an additional $800,000.00 to pay for insurance next year (it will be required every year for the foreseeable future). In fact, her number is just a guess because, to date, we have no carrier for 2024. When you add on the anticipated increase in deductibles and the expected decline in our bond rating, we are looking at a disastrous increase in the cost of running the city, and yet Sanghvi, for some reason, does not include any of this in her analysis of what is impacting the budget.
Sanghvi and Mayor Ron Kim continually blame the loss of Travelers on the cost Travelers has had to bear for representation of former city officials related to the Attorney General’s investigation. I challenge anyone to find out where Kim or Sanghvi have acknowledged the actual reason stated by Travelers for dropping the city, i.e., the breakdown of Risk and Safety, let alone try to explain it.
The suggestion made by Mayoral candidate John Safford at the October 23, 2023, City Council meeting that the city invite Travelers to help the city understand the problems with Risk and Safety and discuss how to address them was met by silence from the Council members.
Sanghvi has allocated no money to replace the Director of Risk and Safety. Kim insists that the Assistant City Attorney, who has no background or training in this area, has the time to handle the Risk and Safety full-time job in addition to his other responsibilities. Pretending the problem does not exist seems a form of magical thinking.
Two possibilities:
Whichever you think it is, the failure of the city’s Commissioner of Finance to acknowledge the reality of our city’s finances in addressing the public raises profound questions of integrity and responsibility. She has allowed politics to supersede fiscal analysis. The following are just three examples of major problems with this proposed budget.
Sanghvi’s proposed budget is eerily similar to her 2023 budget. In that one she proposed no new hires but now complains that there were 30 hires after the budget was passed all of which she doesn’t mention she supported.
So it should come as no surprise that she has arbitrarily refused to fund items like a new jaws of life in her proposed budget. This is a device firemen use to cut through the metal of a car to free victims after a car crash. The city has some small ones that work in most situations, but the existing large one is over twenty years old, no longer functions, and needs to be replaced.
Public Works Commissioner Golub, who does not oversee the department responsible for this item, pointed out the need to fund it at the October 23, 2023, workshop. Sanghvi’s response was not to fund it but to suggest a risk analysis: “We need to do a risk analysis.” [JK: Maybe the analysis should have been done before the budget was published?]
This chilling incident should give the readers of this blog an idea of how poorly thought-out the proposed budget is.
Corissa Salvo is the city’s Civil Service Coordinator. She is among the most knowledgeable employees in her respective field in our city. To witness her extraordinary talents, watch this video of her presentation to the City Council at this budget workshop. Impressive.
In an extraordinarily well-crafted presentation that includes comparisons with other municipalities, she documents the fact that her office is badly understaffed. In fact, she shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the situation is sufficiently bad that the city is out of compliance with the state’s requirements for the management of civil service exams due to a lack of staff.
She essentially pleads with the Council to refund a third position in her office that has been vacant for approximately four years.
She also asks that her part-time staff member be granted a raise. She reminds the Council that her part-time person has not received a raise in three years. She notes that in an earlier meeting with Sanghvi’s office, she had advocated this and was asked where the money would come from. At the time, she told them the small amount of money could come from the medical exam budget. What did Commissioner Sanghvi do in response? She reduced the allocation for the medical exam budget but then did not use the money to raise the part-time employee’s salary.
Ms. Salvo also asked for a 4% raise, which is what the unionized city hall employees are getting.
While the other non-union employees, of which Ms. Salvo is one, are all getting a 2% raise, the difference is that the Council granted hefty raises to their Deputies last year but made no such accommodation for Ms. Salvo.
Ms. Salvo explained in her presentation that the only way she has been able to keep civil service afloat is by working extra unpaid hours.
I do not know how long Ms. Salvo will have to endure all of this, but given the many retirements and resignations among city employees over the last two years, it seems prudent to worry about how long she may remain with the city. It would be very expensive to replace her if the city could even find someone as experienced and qualified as she is.
I can’t help but note the difference between Ms. Salvo’s request for an additional employee, which involved a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis (see video), and the case Commissioner Sanghvi made when she wanted to request the Council’s support for her office to hire an executive assistant for her. In Sanghvi’s case, all she offered was a one-word rationale, “parity.” She deserved the position because the other elected officials had executive assistants. Her predecessor Michele Madigan observed that the Finance office, during her ten years, had functioned effectively without an executive assistant.
In this video, Ms. Salvo makes her case:
In this video, former Commissioner of Public Safety Lew Benton raises the alarm about underfunded items in Sanghvi’s budget and overly optimistic income projections. Rather than specifically address Benton’s concerns, Sanghvi gives a rambling and unfocused speech that fails to address the issues he raises. She assured the public that her experienced team had done a great job.
I received this message from Joanne Kiernan, a former candidate for Commissioner of Finance who ran in 2021.
“Good morning
People are not happy with the handling of the city finances and the council as a whole. Three commissioners are running unopposed so people don’t even have a choice. More and more people were asking me if they could write my name in and I said sure. Then it became a little organized when someone sent me the flier and asked if it could be shared. I love Saratoga Springs and I think Saratogians would best be served by someone who is qualified and committed to the city.
People can write my name in at the bottom right hand corner of the ballot under Commissioner of Finance column.”
Democrats on the Saratoga Springs City Council voted 4 to 1 to spend $10,000 to hire a law firm that has been a generous contributor to Mayor Kim and the Saratoga Springs Democrats to investigate “allegations of discriminatory conduct”.
The tenth item on Mayor Ron Kim’s agenda at the October 17, 2023, Saratoga Springs City Council meeting was a resolution for “Authorization for Mayor to Sign Contract with The Towne Law Firm to Conduct Workplace Investigation.” Linked to this line were four items, including the actual resolution along with the Request for Quote (RFQ) all of which were extremely vague.
There was no public explanation as to what action required investigation nor who allegedly did the action. As far as I can tell, based on what was said at the meeting, there is no record of an actual complaint.
The Mayor claimed that the city had to hire an outside law firm for this investigation because there was no one available in city hall, including HR, who did not have a conflict of interest. It was never explained what this conflict was.
The entire process was the most opaque discussion I have ever observed at a Council meeting. For those who want to endure the entire eight minutes it went on, I have included a clip at the end of this blog.
The firm that was selected by the four members of the Council (Kim, Moran, Sanghvi, and Golub) contributed $1,000.00 to Kim’s campaign chest and more to other Democratic candidates and the city Democratic Committee.
The Towne law firm has contributed:
On further research (more on that shortly), I learned that the issue to be investigated was sexual harassment.
In fact, the protocols for such investigations require that to protect all involved, investigations are supposed to be as protected from public scrutiny as possible, which I expect is why the discussion was so obtuse.
As noted, no reason why the human resources department would have a conflict of interest in investigating this was offered. HR is supposed to be the vehicle for addressing issues like sexual harassment. Unfortunately, in the spirit of catch-22, under the issue of privacy, there is no way to find out if there were any actual complaints filed for harassment, let alone why HR would recuse themselves and whether it was appropriate for them to do so.
The need for privacy and caution went off the rails the following day when Mayor Ron Kim went to the Times Union in order to get a story. He included an email that, in effect, identified the target of the investigation along with the potential victims. In the spirit of the protocols that protect privacy, I am not including the emails or a link to the story.
Curiously, Tracy Sangare (sometimes referred to as Tracy Krosky), a BLM activist, read this email during the public comment portion of the Council meeting. It was apparently given to her by a Council member.
As routinely happens at Council meetings, the discussion about hiring the Towne Law Firm devolved into raised voices and ugliness. For those of you who, for some reason, have not had enough of this stuff, here’s yet another video.
In contrast, consider John Safford, the Republican candidate for Mayor, who made brief and thoughtful observations on the city’s insurance and bonding problems during the public comment period.
No one on the Council responded to his suggestions.
The first of two public hearings on the proposed city budget, required by the city charter, was held at the October 17, 2023, Saratoga Springs City Council meeting.
Prior to the Kim administration, there were no limits on comments made during public hearings. It should be apparent that limiting comments to four minutes makes serious analysis virtually impossible for a document as large and comprehensive as the city’s proposed budget. This had never been an issue before.
Nevertheless, Tuesday night, the Mayor insisted on imposing the 4-minute time limit when former Finance Commissioner Michele Madigan stepped up to the microphone. Unfortunately for him, he was dealing with Michele Madigan, whose spirited presentation frustrated his efforts to limit her.
In her comments, Ms. Madigan severely took Finance Commissioner Sanghvi to task for problems with her proposed budget. She specifically made no bones about the deplorable way Sanghvi handled the Public Safety budget. Budget meetings are supposed to be about analyzing the requested and itemized budget proposals by departments on what they need and why. In classic “performance politics,” Sanghvi spent a major part of the recent meeting on the Public Safety part of the budget assailing the commission form of government and on the alleged failures of the previous administration. This is because Commissioner Sanghvi feels more comfortable talking about everything other than numbers. The poverty of her ability with numbers is sliced and diced by Lew Benton (past Commissioner of public safety) in the text below following the video of Ms. Madigan’s comments.
Lew’s analysis is an eye-opener for those willing to read through its figures.
PS For those frustrated with Commissioner Sanghvi’s performance in office and disappointed that she is running unopposed, I understand some folks are organizing a write-in campaign for her opponent in the last election, Joanne Kiernan.
The proposed 2024 City Comprehensive Budget as presently constructed is concerning. It will require significant amendments if operating deficits are to be avoided next year.
First and foremost, it includes unfavorable budget variances in both major revenue and expenditure accounts.
This comes on the heels of a 2023 budget, the first prepared and adopted by current City Council members, that preordained the 2024 proposal’s many overstated anticipated revenues and, in some cases, grossly underfunded expenditure lines.
The proposed 2024 operating budget is not in balance and must not be adopted until it is. To bring it into balance will require a more realistic examination of several accounts, including those referenced below, and the political will to act.
No doubt, the lack of institutional knowledge and limited understanding of how this government functions on the part of a council made up of first-term members can, in part, temper the inadequacies in the 2023 budget. However failure to recognize and correct them going forward is unacceptable and a violation of the fiduciary’s responsibility.
Attempting to transfer blame to those who had no hand in the adoption of the 2023 budget or the preparation of the 2024 plan, citing recent high inflation and the dearth of new revenue streams for the city’s fiscal difficulties, rings hollow.
All local governments are faced with the same headwinds. It might be more honest to acknowledge that hiring additional non-essential employees was not prudent, that budgeting non-existent revenues, and that deliberately lowballing major expenditures invites deficit spending.
Following are examples of the unfavorable variances in the proposed 2024 operating budget. There are, to be sure, others.
Revenues
In Finance, $850,000 in Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue is proposed for 2024. This is over $100,000 more than was actually realized in FY 2022 and over $600,000 more than has been received to date this year.
The 2023 budget includes a non-existent ‘Cannabis Tax’ revenue of $250,000. The proposed 2024 budget carries that same amount forward. Potential first-time revenues such as this one do not usually meet expectations. And by prematurely including the revenue in the 2023 budget only added to a negative revenue variance
The proposed Mortgage Tax revenue for 2024 is $1.5 million compared to the $933,400 collected to date this year. The $933,400 is far below the $2.05 million budget.
The Fed’s attempts to reign in inflation have depressed mortgage markets even here in Saratoga Springs. Thus, even the $1.5 million proposed seems unrealistic.
The mayor’s budget is ripe with unfavorable 2024 revenue variances. The Building Permit account carries a proposed $700,000 revenue even in the face of a major decline in permit revenues this year. To date, Finance lists Building Permit revenue at $352,520, with only $400,000 projected by the end of the FY. This is $300,000 less than was budgeted. Artificially inflating anticipated revenue only increases the structural deficit.
In recent years, this revenue has been strong, but, at least for the short term, it is most unlikely that in one year, that revenue will increase 75%, from $400,000 to $700,000.
Likewise, Planning Board fees are unrealistically overstated. Actual 2022 Planning Board revenue was $122,820. Still, this revenue line was increased to $200,000 in the adopted 2023 budget but is now projected by Finance to fall $35,000 short.
Now, in spite of the anticipated 2023 unfavorable variance, Finance has increased the line to $250,000 for 2024. Perhaps an explanation for this doubling of the 2022 revenue and increasing the anticipated 2023 collections by $85,000 in the 2024 budget is in order.
Other suspect revenue lines in the mayor’s budget include Insurance Reimbursement, which went from $ 0- this year to $125,000 next year.
The Public Safety revenue budget includes a $300,000 increase in Ambulance Transportation charges over the $2 million projected to be realized by the end of FY-23 and is over $500,000 more than actually collected in 2022.
Unless the fee structure is significantly increased, this revenue line is likely to fall far short of the $2.3 million in the proposed 2024 budget.
Parking Enforcement revenue is now anticipated to be $462,0000 this year, down almost $80,000 from the $540,000 budgeted and $38,000 less than the $500,000 in the 2024 proposal.
Operating Expenditures
The operating budget also includes many likely unfavorable variances. Just as overestimating revenues in the actual 2003 and proposed 2024 budgets contributed to the city’s present fiscal dilemma, so have what appears to be unfavorable variances in the operating budgets.
In the 2023 public safety operating budget, the City Council included $190,000 for firefighter overtime. Finance now projects that $ 533,500 will be spent by the end of the fiscal year, an astronomical increase of $343,500 over the budgeted amount.
Similarly, the Firefighter Compensation Time budget is anticipated to be overspent. Only $190,000 was earmarked for this line in the 2023 budget but $563,000 is anticipated to be spent by year’s end, a $ 373,000 overage.
So, too, is the proposed 2024 Police Overtime and Compensation Timelines grossly underfunded. Finance proposes to appropriate the rather odd amount of $263,637 for Compensation Time vis a vis the $483,570 spent in 2022 and the projected $450,000 in 2023. The 2024 OT line is set at $325,000 against the $507,505 expended in 2022 and the estimated $450,000 this year.
In the aggregate, Finance is proposing 2024 Police and Fire Fighter OT and Comp Time expenditures totaling $1,338,637, although corresponding 2022 costs were $1,498,271 and projected 2023 expenditures are $1,981,000.
While there may have been unique circumstances that have resulted in higher than normal Police and Firefighter OT and Compensation Time expenditures this year, the proposed 2024 appropriations are well below what will be needed to avoid the necessity of transferring large amounts during the course of FY 24.
In the Mayor’s office, $20,000 was budgeted for outside legal counsel this year, but Finance projects that over $92,000 will be spent. Only $20,000 is earmarked for next year. Now it appears that yet more outside legal services will be retained to investigate an offending mail. This is madness.
These references are not all-inclusive. There are many more questions to be asked and answered. Why, for example, has Code Blue shelter support been cut from the budget.
There is time to prepare a more realistic 2024 operating budget. I hope the City Council will do so lest the new Council be bequeathed an extraordinary fiscal challenge.
Lew Benton
10/20/2024
I just received the information that the jury in the Darryl Mount case ruled in favor of the city. I will publish more information as it becomes available.
Tonight’s (10/17/23) Saratoga Springs City Council agendas are yet another unfortunate example of the dysfunction in city hall in general and in the Mayor’s office in particular. I say “agendas” because there are two conflicting versions of tonight’s order of business posted on the city website by the Mayor’s office (see above). When and for how long the public can speak tonight depends on which agenda you look at.
On one agenda labeled the “Meeting Sequence,” the public comment period tonight is scheduled to run for only 15 minutes right after the 6PM Call to Order, Roll Call, and Salute to the Flag. On the actual Council agenda, though, comment is scheduled for an undetermined amount of time sometime after 7 p.m. after a hearing on the 2024 Comprehensive Budget.
So when can the public comment, and for how long?
Do citizens who want to speak show up at 6 only to have to wait until well after 7 for an opportunity to address the Council, or do they show up at 7 and maybe miss the comment period that went ahead at 6? A request for clarification sent to Deputy Mayor Angela Rella was not answered.
Kim has repeatedly touted to the media and in his campaign materials that he has increased “transparency in government” and extended “public comment at Council meetings…working to ensure the voices of residents are heard by the Council.”
In fact, when Kim changed the length of time each speaker had to four minutes from two and cut the public comment period to half an hour, he greatly reduced the number of people who could speak. In addition, he, of course, enforces all these rules sporadically.
Given the controversies over the city’s 2024 budget and the loss of insurance coverage by the city, the public may well have a lot they want to say and many questions they want answered. Kim seems to have done his best to make this difficult.
On September 14, 2023, Travelers Insurance notified the city that as of January 1, 2024, they would no longer be insuring Saratoga Springs.
Readers of this blog may have observed its increasingly shrill tone. I have been writing repeatedly that the indifference to law and reality by the Saratoga Springs City Council would eventually bring the proverbial chickens home.
That day has come, although Mayor Kim and Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran and Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi have apparently tried to suppress the news until after the upcoming election.
The reason for the city losing its insurance coverage?
The City of Saratoga Springs’ approach to risk and safety management creates an unacceptable increase in the hazards contemplated for the City. Therefore, we are nonrenewing your policy effective 1/1/2024.
Sincerely,
Brady Giroux
Account Executive
Letter of September 14, 2023 from Travelers
I knew there would be some sort of letter coming from Travelers, but I had expected it would be to notify the city of an increase in premiums. I FOILED the city for such a letter. That FOIL would have eventually produced nothing, as is now evident, because rather than raise rates, Travelers has simply decided to end the city’s insurance all together.
The letter, received by the city a month ago, was released today by Commissioner of Public Safety James Montagnno, who somehow learned about the document and requested and received a copy on October 12, 2023.
In a prepared statement to the media, Public Safety Commissioner James Montagnino observed:
The result of Mayor Kim’s decision to leave the City without a Director of Risk and Safety for the first time in decades will be that the City will need to obtain its insurance through the municipal equivalent of an assigned risk pool. This will cost the City close to a million dollars in additional premiums each year.
Commissioner Montagnino, October 13, 2023
In today’s online Daily Gazette story Kim, in typical fashion, tries to place the blame for any lack of transparency in sharing the letter with his fellow Council members on his Deputy Angela Rella:
Kim said he was informed by the insurance broker the city uses “a week or two ago, or so” [JK: try a month ago] and wasn’t sure if his Deputy Mayor Angela Rella shared it with the commissioners [JK: she didn’t share it with Montagnino].
“We are already anticipating a 78% [increase],” Kim said. “The exact number I can’t recall, but I think it was 78%.”
Daily Gazette
In the article, Montagnino states that the city had a civil service list with qualified candidates to fill the critical Risk and Safety position, but Kim allowed the position to go unfilled for months following the departure of long time and well respected Risk and Safety Management Director Marilyn Rivers. (Rivers is currently suing the city over the toxic employment environment she was forced to endure). This blogger has written extensively about both the disastrous handling by Kim of Risk and Safety and his vindictive abuse of Ms. Rivers.
Instead of filling the position, Kim finally added the responsibilities of a Risk and Safety Manager to the duties of newly appointed City Attorney Michael Phillips. Not surprisingly Travelers did not consider this approach to managing the city’s risk and safety adequate.
In spite of the Travelers’ letter clearly stating why they are dropping city coverage, Kim, without any evidence, gave the press a different reason:
Kim, in turn, blames the prior administration’s actions for lawsuits the city is facing as well as the Attorney General’s investigation into whether the city violated the Civil Rights of Black Lives Matter protestors during prior summer protests.
Daily Gazette October 13, 2023
I will not subject the readers of this blog to Kim’s usual rehashing that the city’s problems are all rooted in the actions of the previous administration. In the article, he goes on about all the money the city is having to pay for attorneys to represent past elected officials in the New York State Attorney General’s investigation and in the cost of defending the city in the lawsuit brought by Black Lives Matter leader Lexis Figuereo.
But the letter from Travelers Insurance could not be clearer as to why Travelers is declining to insure the city. It says nothing about lawsuits or investigations. Risk and Safety are critical to minimizing the city’s liability, and Kim simply cannot or will not admit this basic truth.
Consider the following episodes and ask yourself, if you were the executive of an insurance company, would you do business with a city that had the current elected officials in charge.
It is worth noting that missing in Finance Commissioner Sanghvi’s presentation of the proposed 2024 budget last week, during which she also sounded the theme of blaming the previous administration, this time for the city’s budget woes, was the fact that the city would need to find a million dollars due to our loss of an insurance carrier. Missing also was who was responsible for this disaster.
I have taken to calling the current Council “the Wrecking Crew.” This latest debacle will probably cost our city $1,000,000.00 in premiums and increased deductibles. Readers should understand that this is just the most recent public revelation of the impact of the incompetence and vindictiveness in City Hall. There will be more.
[JK: this is a piece by Freddy DeBoer, who maintains an email list for subscribers. It addresses the thorny issue of dealing with mentally ill people who are a danger to others and/or to themselves. Legislative actions and legal decisions seeking reform of the mental health system have made the vulnerable more vulnerable, he argues.
DeBoer is critical of the advocates of the disabled whose ideology blinds them to the reality of mental illness.]
My hometown lies along the Connecticut River, but you’d never know it by walking around. That’s because, in the 1960s, the American mania for building highways resulted in the construction of Route 9, which ran directly along the western bank of the river. Though there are two underpasses that one can use to reach the banks of the river (and the imaginatively named Riverside Park), both cut through grimier former industrial areas, and while I wouldn’t call them dangerous places, they are far from pleasant. Standing on most stretches of Middletown’s lovely and broad Main Street, you’d never know the park was there, much less how to get there, despite Main Street lying perhaps a couple hundred yards from the river at most. Once upon a time, the river was the economic heart of the town, and of the nearby region; at one point, Middletown looked like a rising powerhouse of commerce, as goods were shipped to and from Long Island Sound and New York via its waterways. But the creation of the country’s highway system did more than just divide Middletown from its waterfront; it robbed the town of the river’s commercial potential. The construction of America’s vast interstate highway system had already greatly reduced the salience of shipping via river. Thus our country’s automobile obsession hurt my hometown in two ways, first by rendering obsolete a key industry, then by physically separating it from the river and, in doing so, robbing it of natural beauty, public recreation space, and areas where shops and restaurants might have stood.
Not that the loss of the river as a jobs creator was the only economic problem. Though deindustrialization is typically presented as a Midwestern phenomenon, a problem of the Rust Belt, New England was in fact deeply damaged by the collapse of solid dependable jobs in manufacturing and industry, jobs that were often unionized and which gave a generation of men without college degrees the ability to own homes and raise families. By the time I was conscious enough to notice the outside world, in the mid-1980s, Connecticut was dotted with old mills, brick buildings that once housed productive labor but had since been gutted and turned into apartments, or else sat moldering, unused. I said that Main Street is lovely, and in many ways it is, particularly since the turn of the millennium and the coming of a wave of new economic fortune in the area. But Main Street has also been, in my lifetime, a site of economic collapse, full of boarded up businesses and empty buildings. The further north one went up the street, away from the town green, the more boarded-up doors you were likely to find, as the north end of Middletown is the “rough” part of town, or as rough as a mostly-quiet town of 45,000 residents in Connecticut is likely to be. Today, as I suggested, Main Street is a destination again, in part because the impossible happened – students from Wesleyan University, just up the hill on Washington Street, began to go downtown, bringing their wallets with them. But in the 80s and 90s, they stayed far away. And that had everything to do with Connecticut Valley Hospital, and with Jessica Short.
Wesleyan sits at the top of a hill overlooking the Connecticut River Valley. Its oldest and most picturesque buildings, known as College Row, are a series of brownstones that include the main administrative buildings and president’s office, the ’92 Theater building (that’s 1892) where my father often taught classes, the chapel in which I was baptized, and a building that now houses the Psychology department. From that hill you can look out and see another set of buildings, including some brownstones made with materials quarried from the same place – Portland, Connecticut, right across the bridge. That other collection of buildings also looks bucolic and collegiate from the outside, though looks can be deceiving. This other facility sits on the same side of the river as Wesleyan, but because of a bend in its path the buildings can appear to be on the other side. The divide between those facilities is more than geographic. For while the brownstones to the west are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and training a new generation of the ruling class, those to the east house those who, until very recently, would have been called insane. Today, we’re more likely to say that the patients at CVH suffer from mental illness. Either way, they live in a different world from the busy meritocrats who pursue degrees and their dreams.
Connecticut Valley Hospital is the state government’s major mental health facility; though there are private hospitals, like the labyrinthian Yale New Haven psychiatric ward, and a few much smaller state-run hospitals, CVH is the final destination for a large portion of anyone who receives state-directed care in Connecticut. (The state, after all, just isn’t very big.) There are addiction treatment centers and a few other sundry institutions that are state funded, but when it comes to housing the deeply disturbed under the government’s auspices, CVH is the place. Two other state psychiatric hospitals were closed and consolidated into CVH in the 1990s. The rich, as they always have, receive care in upscale facilities far beyond the reach of the average psychotic. The rest of us go to CVH, which is unremarkable, as far as these facilities go. It just so happens that the hospital lies in Middletown.
This reality, of state-governed care in Connecticut for the mentally ill being concentrated in one place, has created some issues for the people of Middletown. The experience of living next to a facility like CVH provides something of a lesson in the need for a robust social state and the ripple effects of not having one. Patients at CVH are often there on involuntary holds, compelled by the law to stay, particularly those housed in the Whiting Forensic ward – “forensic ward” being the psychiatric world’s euphemism for where they lock up patients who have committed or are likely to commit violent crimes. But involuntary holds, as opposed to treatment mandated by legal verdict, are temporary affairs. And when people are released from involuntary holds, the services available to them are often meager. You’d like to think that there would be a network of halfway houses and social workers who could shepherd the recently-committed mentally ill back into the world safely, but in most parts of this country, those resources are depressingly thin. Connecticut is little different; there’s some programs, out there, but not nearly enough. And so when people are released from CVH, whether formerly sectioned under an involuntary hold or because there’s no one to pay for their continued treatment or their stay simply ends, sometimes, they’re walked to the door and released, left to their own devices. The natural next step is to amble, down the hill, towards Main Street.
Which means that throughout my life Middletown has had a population of mentally ill homeless people that’s totally out of proportion with its overall size. Main Street is one of the major arteries in town, it’s home to several churches and charitable organizations that might help someone out with food or a bed, and unlike most of the city, it’s walkable. It becomes therefore a natural place for a mentally ill homeless people to roost. And roost they did; throughout my adolescence, I was aware of several regular characters among their number, most notoriously “the King,” a Black schizophrenic man who (legend holds) earned his title by spending a period with a paper Burger King crown permanently affixed to his head. He would, eventually, be killed in a horrific car accident after wandering into the flow of traffic on a nearby bridge. Before his death he had a habit of shouting racial slurs at Asian American people, but like most of them he was generally harmless – generally. Homeless people with serious mental illnesses are, indeed, more likely to commit violent crimes, just as they are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes. And even beyond their capacity for violence, such people can appear frightening to many. I’m not justifying repression of the mentally ill or the homeless. I am saying that it’s just statistically sensible to be a little more scared of them than of any random person. But this has become, somehow, controversial.
Anyway – you can understand the dilemma for my hometown. Whether being released directly from CVH, or from transitional housing nearby, people with serious mental illnesses would find themselves congregating in Middletown’s downtown. This has led people from neighboring towns to use the nickname “Mentaltown” for our city, which is ugly, but apt. This reputation, as a place for crazy people, was not the primary reason for Main Street’s decline in the last decades of the 20th century – that was surely the previously-mentioned deindustrialization that had killed many local jobs and the severing of the city from the river. People had less money and there were fewer reasons to go downtown. But being Mentaltown didn’t help. And, on July 28th, 1989, that reputation was sealed for years to come, in the most shocking of ways.
That day saw the annual Sidewalk Sale in Middletown, an event designed to get local people to travel down to Main Street and keep the businesses there afloat. Vendors would set up tables on the sidewalk in front of their storefronts and enjoy the chance to drum up a little more business. Various entertainments were held, like free balloons for children or the opportunity for kids to climb into a fire truck. Nine-year-old Middletown resident Jessica Short was enjoying the day with her mother. She would become the victim of a very bad mistake made worse by very bad timing.
In the years that followed, various investigations and a lawsuit would attempt to understand how, exactly, David Peterson had come to be released from Whiting Forensic Hospital in the CVH complex. Whiting is a medium-to-maximum security facility, after all; more importantly, Peterson had, at 37 years old, twice stabbed people while in the throes of schizophrenic psychosis. And yet somehow he was allowed to simply walk away from the hospital and board a bus downtown. Over the years that followed, there would be considerable confusion and debate about whether he was released due to a clerical error or whether he was knowingly set free for a day, in the manner that patients are sometimes allowed at psychiatric hospitals. (The New York Times piece the next day would say, cryptically, that he was released “on a pass,” but a follow-up article the next March said only that he had been “released.”) It appears some sort of formal choice to allow him to leave the grounds was made, but whether this decision was made based on miscommunication or bad information, or who made it, were never clear. Eventually, the civil case Jessica Short’s family brought against the hospital and the state would be settled, for $1.5 million, and whatever reason for continuing to pursue the question evaporated.
While exactly why Peterson was released will forever remain a mystery, nothing else about that day’s events is controversial. One way or another, he was released. He rode the bus down to Main Street. He bought a knife. And then, when he saw Jessica Short emerge from Woolworth’s general store, a Middletown institution that would close not that long after, he stabbed her more than thirty times, in front of her mother and dozens of witnesses. He was quickly wrestled to the ground by onlookers and subdued by the police; he would eventually make his way back to the very psychiatric hospital that had released him, where he remains to this day. (After he was found not guilty of Jessica Short’s murder by reason of insanity, a panel committed Peterson to Whiting for 70 years.) Locals, naturally, were horrified. Jessica Short’s family was left to mourn. And for almost two decades, downtown Middletown was finished. People had been afraid to go there because they thought the mentally ill population made it a dangerous place to go. After the sidewalk sale, how could you have told them that they were wrong?
In my adult lifetime, and especially in the past decade, I’ve watched as the discourse around mental health has changed. A cadre of disability activists, overwhelmingly made up of those with college educations and cultural capital, have been remarkably effective at changing what it means to be disabled. This change is epitomized by coming to see disabilities as identities, not negative attributes that individuals must navigate but totalizing and existential definitions of the self. And a corollary to the attitude of disability-as-identity is that disability therefore cannot be bad, that anyone that suggests that disabilities are negative is engaged in bigotry. This means that those with disabilities that result in outcomes that are indisputably bad – like, say, when someone’s schizophrenia leads them to habitually stab other people – must be marginalized, excluded, avoided, ignored. Because psychotic patients who kill people can’t be brightsided, can’t be swept up into some optimistic narrative of disabled people as proud and empowered agents who control their own destiny, they must therefore be sidelined in the discourse, locked away in a kind of discursive asylum, hidden from consideration, kept where they can’t be seen.
Conveniently for activists, people like Peterson are too sick to participate in the debate about disability anyway, as are (for example) people whose cerebral palsy have rendered them nonverbal, those whose disabilities also can’t be spun off as a “superpower.” Anyone who is not disabled, even the families of those with severe disabilities, is told they may not participate in the conversation. So a group of educated professionals whose disabilities don’t hinder their participation in elite society, many self-diagnosed, dominate the debate. They insist that disability is only different, not damaging, demand special accommodations despite that contention, and when confronted with contrary information angrily dismiss it. So Jordan Neely, a profoundly disabled person who died a tragic death, is misrepresented as just a sweet and harmless Michael Jackson impersonator, the public concern for him based on a cheerful caricature rather than a full and adult accounting of all of his problems; so Kanye West, diagnosed with a psychotic disorder years ago, is written out of the community of the disabled, with many activists angrily insisting that his instability could never be the product of mental illness, as to allow for the possibility that it was would be to suggest that mental illness is something bad. And we can’t have that.
Were this all abstract, perhaps it would not matter much. But it’s not abstract. For one example, the question of involuntary commitment, of society being empowered to detain and treat people with severe mental illness without their consent, is deeply influenced by activist rhetoric. And despite what so many people think, it has gotten vastly harder over time to ensure treatment of treatment-resistant patients, in most contexts. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963, which made deinstitutionalization a federal policy, shrunk the number of facilities in which such patients could be housed and pushed many of them onto the streets – ostensibly to receive treatment at community mental healthcare centers, which were mostly never built. In 1965, the birth of Medicaid created fiscal incentives for states to push patients out of state-funded facilities and into private treatment, essentially moving those patients off of their own books and onto those of the federal government without any concern for actual treatment. The O’Connor v Donaldson Supreme Court decision in 1975 established the standard that a patient can only be involuntarily treated if they are at imminent risk of physically harming themselves or those around them, which perversely removed sickness itself from the equation. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 further empowered patients to reject involuntary treatment. The Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act provided a new range of restrictions on how doctors and facilities could handle patients held against their will and how long they could hold them. Again and again, our society has made involuntary treatment harder. That’s reality.
There are thousands of families that have experienced the profound helplessness of trying to force a loved one into care when they desperately need it. Like the family of Bailey Hamor, who fought for years to get him into inpatient treatment, were repeatedly denied, and then had to deal with the horrific fallout after he stuck a knife into another man’s head, ending the life of his victim and, for all intents and purposes, his own. You’re opposed to involuntary treatment of the deeply disturbed, OK. But you must count the costs.
Now, activists want to ban the practice of involuntary treatment altogether. Disability rights activists are joined by “anti-carceral” activists, the defund the police set, in insisting that no one should ever be forced into treatment, regardless of how dangerous they might be to themselves or those around them. Of course horrible crimes like the murder of Jessica Short are rare, but there are perfectly common outcomes that are profoundly tragic too – domestic violence, assault of others, self-injury, accidental overdose, suicide. Those few of us who oppose the disability activist agenda say that those patients who are liberated from involuntary treatment by means of the law and then promptly die because of their conditions “die with their rights on.” The term was coined by a psychiatrist in the 1970s, I believe, in reference to a patient with severe anorexia who battled for the right to be released from involuntary treatment, won a victory that was cheered by many activists, and then promptly starved to death. The same terms can be applied to the many, many people who have been sprung from involuntary commitment only to go on to kill themselves; they died with their rights on.
That seems to me to be an obviously senseless outcome, but at least it’s something they’ve done to themselves. What are we to tell people who are physically threatened by those released from involuntary treatment, as the people at the sidewalk sale were threatened by Peterson, accidental though his release may have been? The activists have no answer; they simply quote dubious statistics about how the mentally ill are harmless, ignoring the fact that the National Institute of Mental Health’s numbers show that people with psychotic disorders are significantly more likely to commit violent crimes. (Which is of course perfectly sensible and predictable given what we know about insanity, paranoia, and violence.) Where do those who call for an end to all forced hospitalization think those who are a constant danger to themselves and others will go? What do they think people like Peterson will do when freed? I debate this stuff all the time, and I have no idea what their answers are. They have no pragmatic view of what dangerous mentally ill patients look like because their ideology prevents them from accepting the reality that such people exist in the first place. The more you press them for details about what should be done with those whose disorders render them violent, the more they escape into rhetoric. And given that their intellectual world is filled with people with ADHD and self-diagnosed autism, who declare themselves to be the face of disability, they’re almost never come face to face with these questions anyway.
It is right that David Peterson has spent his life in hospitals and not prisons. The legal accommodations that we give to the severely mentally ill (threatened, perversely, by the activist class that claims to speak for everyone who’s sick) are one of the only things this society can offer people like Peterson. It’s terrible that Whiting Forensic has been the site of a lot of abuse and mismanagement, and I’m glad that the state is finally ready to tear the place down and start over with something more modern and humane. I hope the new facility will be a place where people like Peterson can heal. The battle to preserve the ability to treat those whose disorders hijack their minds, destroy their impulse control, and render them unable to sort fantasy from reality – that battle is done for the good of the Jessica Shorts of the world, yes. But it’s also done to prevent other patients from facing the fate of Bailey Hamor or David Peterson. They will spend most of the rest of their lives confined to treatment facilities, which is the only responsible decision society can make. If we empower our society to be more proactive about treating profoundly sick people, maybe we can save not just future victims but also preserve the change that potentially violent patients can live free and normal lives.
I hope David Peterson isn’t suffering, at Whiting, and I hope the reforms to that place or the one that comes after leave him in more humane conditions. But I’m also glad he’s locked up in there. And I’m willing to bet that, though they would never admit it, deep down the activists are glad that he’s in there too.
At the September 19, 2023, Saratoga Springs City Council meeting, Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran introduced a resolution that canceled a public hearing that Public Safety Commissioner James Montagnino had scheduled. As documented below, this petty move against Montagnino was unprecedented. City Attorney Tony Izzo was called on to comment on the procedure, and he observed that in the thirty-five years he has worked for the city, no Commissioner had ever been denied the opportunity to seek public input regarding a proposal through a public hearing.
While Moran was the point person in this latest incident, he was supported in this move by Mayor Kim and Commissioners Sanghvi and Golub. They have become the city’s “wrecking crew.”
Moran’s move on Montagnino was accompanied by toxic remarks, which have sadly become the norm at the Council table. The Mayor, who chairs the meetings, not only failed to admonish Moran for his lack of civility in addressing a fellow Council member, but he is a frequent perpetrator of the same ugly behavior himself.
Moran’s resolution was to cancel a public hearing that Montagnino had scheduled to discuss his proposal to change the rules for the public comment period. Montagnino’s resolution would have required that persons living or employed or owning real property in Saratoga Springs be allowed to speak before other individuals.
Montagnino’s resolution was in response to increasing frustration from many that Black Lives Matter activists, most of whom live outside of the city, had come to regularly monopolize the public comment period, often leaving little if any time for residents to speak about other issues.
This situation has become even more acute since Kim limited the public comment period to thirty minutes and increased the amount of time allotted to each speaker to 4 minutes from two minutes, thus reducing the possible number of people who could speak from 15 to 7 if everyone sticks to their allotted time. In addition, Kim announced he would not hold people to the four-minute limit and routinely arbitrarily enforces the time limit. He seems to have adopted two standards. Those he agrees with, he simply notes that the four-minute limit is up and then gently reminds them of the limit as the speaker continues. For those expressing opinions he does not like, he is far more forceful. In that case, he loudly and aggressively interrupts them, telling them to “wrap up.”
Kim also added an option to speak to the Council via Zoom at the end of the Council meetings, which routinely go on till past 11PM. Those wishing to comment must sign up for Zoom between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on the day of the meeting.
The result of the Mayor’s arbitrary and random management of public comment is that people who take the time to attend a Council meeting in order to address pending resolutions are often frustrated when they discover the allocated time has run out and they will not be allowed to speak.
New items are only to be added to the agenda during a Council meeting if there is some sort of urgency. The person requesting the agenda addition is supposed to offer an explanation as to why it cannot wait for the next meeting. It then requires a majority vote for it to be added.
There is good reason for this. In the interest of transparency, the public is supposed to be informed regarding all action items through an agenda that is required by the city charter to be available for public review no later than noon the day before the Council meets. This is meant to ensure that interested citizens can respond prior to Council action.
This policy is routinely violated by Council members who often add items at the last minute at the Council table without explaining why they couldn’t wait for the next meeting (or why they couldn’t have managed to put it on that meeting’s agenda….). Mayor Kim, who, as the chair, is supposed to enforce the rule, of course never does.
In an especially egregious violation of this important rule, Dillon Moran waited until the very end of the September 19, 2023, meeting, when the room was pretty much empty, to add to his agenda his resolution to cancel the public hearing that Montagnino had just set. This was particularly unusual as his agenda had been completed much earlier in the evening. The Public Safety agenda comes last. Following the Public Safety agenda and just before the vote to adjourn, Moran proposed his resolution.
Moran seems to not understand Montagnno’s resolution as he characterizes it as a violation of the Constitutional guarantee of free speech. While I think there are a number of problems with Montagnino’s proposal, it only establishes the order of speakers, it does not preclude anyone from speaking.
[Note that Kim did not ask Moran to explain why this matter was not listed on his agenda and why immediate action was necessary as required by the city charter (Section2.2)]
Commissioner Montagnino asked Tony Izzo, City Attorney, to offer his opinion on the Moran resolution. It was clear that Izzo was a bit non-plussed. “Unusual procedural question, um…” he began.
I have transcribed Izzo’s remarks. If you read them carefully, you will see that Izzo observes that there is a precedent for rescheduling a hearing. Conspicuously absent is anything from Izzo supporting the canceling of a hearing. His remarks observe that “…there is some precedent as well for the Council to remove something from a particular Council agenda for rescheduling (my emphasis) for some future time. So, if that’s the motion for this evening, there is some precedent for it…” In other words, there is a precedent for rescheduling hearings but not for canceling them.
Kim then completely ignores what Izzo has said, asserting that he is sure Izzo agrees that the Council can cancel the public hearing. No one from the Council corrects the Mayor and, with the exception of Montagnino, the four Council members approve the Moran resolution.
Unusual procedural question, um, it has been the procedure of this council as long as I’ve been here to not put to a vote whether or not a commissioner will schedule an item for a public hearing. The council has discussed that topic several times, it’s always resulted in there being no vote to add something to the agenda… rather schedule a public hearing or not. Any commissioner that wants to put something on for a public hearing its put on and then if the council wants to not second it at the hearing date it’s simply not seconded, um, there is also the council’s ability to decide what items go on a particular item agenda can to on a particular agenda, so it is possible, I think, and there is some precedent as well for the council to remove something from a particular council agenda for rescheduling for some future time. So, if that’s the motion for this evening there is some precedent for it, um, I suppose Commissioner Moran’s motion does have some precedent if the council want to remove it from the next upcoming agenda for rescheduling there is some precedent for that.
Tony
In this video clip, Moran launches into a self-righteous rant, calling Montagnino’s resolution “garbage.”
In classic Kim playing lawyer, the Mayor ignores what Tony has told him and instead offers that “it is pretty straightforward” that the Council can vote to cancel the public hearing. Commissioners Jason Golub and Minita Sanghvi also ignored what the City Attorney had to say and voted with Kim and Moran.
As observing readers will note, I have not discussed the substance of the Montagnino resolution. There are a variety of problems with it, but the issue is really not the content of the resolution but its improper cancelation.
For Democrats who claim to support transparency and accessibility to deny the public’s ability to comment on a fellow Council member’s proposal, however flawed, is unprecedented, as City Attorney Izzo observed. The Council would have the final word on whether Montagino’s proposal ever went into effect. I suspect if there had been a public hearing, many speakers would have voiced concern over this proposal. So, what was the harm of giving this a public airing? This united front to block public comment is also curious, given how many public hearings these Council members have scheduled without giving the public access to any concrete document to react to. How disturbing that neither Kim, Moran, Golub, nor Sanghvi stood up for the public’s right to weigh in on a public policy proposal, however flawed. Yet another example of cancel culture.
[JK: Section 4.43 of the Saratoga Springs city charter states that the Commissioner of Finance “shall prepare a proposed Comprehensive Budget and shall submit it to the Council at the first regularly scheduled meeting at the Council in October each year.” Instead of presenting the Council and the public with the actual budget, Finance Commissioner Sanghvi did a PowerPoint presentation heavily laced with political comments. The actual budget was not circulated to the Council until the next day, Wednesday, at 4:13PM. Why she ignored the charter requirement and why she did not have the budget ready to submit is unknown.
Here is former Public Safety Commissioner Lew Benton’s take on her budget.]
City budgets are pretty easy to review. After reading John’s post I called up the proposed 2024 budget.
It is quite interesting.
First, many revenue lines seem inflated and unless the budget presentation included an explanation and justification I hope some hard questions will be asked.
For example, Planning Board revenues are budgeted to increase from projected 2023 fees of $165,000 to $250,000; Mortgage Tax revenues, at $1.5 million, suggest more wishful thinking; Insurance Recoveries go from -0- in 2023 to $125,000 in next year’s proposed budget. Again, perhaps there are valid reasons to so significantly increase these revenues. If so we need to understand them.
These are but a few suspect over budgeted revenues.
On the expenditure side it is noted that the City Attorney’s office has OVERSPENT its outside legal counsel line by a projected $73,300 this year. New positions (a Grant administrator and a Communications Director) have added nearly $115,000 plus fringe benefits. Whether the city really needs a ‘grant administrator’ in addition to the those staff whose job descriptions already include grant writing and administration is a least worth asking. The reality is that there is a huge investment in planning staff and and an office of parks and open space administer whose duty statements clearly requires grant administration.
These two agencies have always worked in harmony, and quite successfully, to identify, compete for and administer grants-in-aide. Does the city now need a third agency, the mayor’s department, to have a full time grant ‘coordinator’ when there are several titles charged with that responsibility. And is a ‘communications director’ really justified in this form of government?
All of this against the backdrop of highest sales tax revenue in the city’s history and 10% MORE this year than was budgeted. And finally, blaming a ‘previous ‘administration on the current problem is unacceptable. The 2023 budget was crafted by the incumbent finance commissioner, not her predecessor and she must own it. The proposed 2024 budget appears at first glance to includes unrealistic revenues and major expenditures that may be understated. Back to the drawing boards, please.
Lew Benton
Saratoga Springs Politics 