Sanghvi Combines Mismanagement of Finance Department With Toxic Personal Attacks

There is simply no gentle way of putting it. Saratoga Springs Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi has grossly mismanaged the city’s Finance Department for the past three years that she has been in office. Most people are unaware of it because Sanghvi has managed so far to avoid serious scrutiny.

In many ways, the Commissioner of Finance is the most demanding elected office in city government. The difficult truth is that the current Commissioner, Minita Sanghvi, has been unwilling to devote the time required to fulfill her responsibility as the city’s chief financial officer and the head of a department that includes IT. As we shall see, her inability to keep the IT Department properly staffed and supervised has had a problematic ripple effect on the ability of other departments in city hall to carry out their responsibilities and on the ability of the public to have the required access to government information. Those who closely observe her actions have found that she is drawn to the drama and celebrity of public office while she appears to be uninterested in the tough challenges of managing the city’s finances and her department.

In addition Commissioner Sanghvi’s rude and arrogant behavior at the Council table (routinely in support of her ally, Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran) contributes to the poisonous atmosphere that continues to invade city deliberations.

The Issues

The most unambiguous expression of her mismanagement was seen in her handling of the on-call fiasco of 2023. As the city’s chief fiscal officer, it is her job to scrutinize all payment requests. In the case of on-call pay, she not only allowed inappropriate payments for deputies, but worse, she indulged her own deputy with a payment. The details of this oversight failure were published in an earlier post. Her refusal to take responsibility for her role in that mess has been most galling. When pressed by the media, she has dismissed the blatant corruption by either belittling it or denying that anything untoward occurred. At the time of this post, the New York State Police are investigating these payments.

It has come as no surprise then that there is an extensive history of this maladministration which this post will explore in depth.

Issues include:

• A budget that fails to provide the resources for essential city needs
• An intemperate attack in the media on her colleagues on the Council
• An inability to adequately staff the city’s IT department with problematic ripple effects on other key city operations and expenditures
• Her role in the city’s crisis in dealing with FOIL requests
• Expensive and essential software allowed to languish unused while the city continues to pay for this
• A cynical and cruel abuse of a city employee to hide her own failures
• A flawed city website that compromises the ability of citizens to navigate it
• Audits that revealed failures in the city’s fiscal management (This will be explored in more depth in a coming post)

An Imperious Sanghvi Simply Ignores The Problems With Her Budget For 2025

In a previous post, I documented that her proposed 2025 budget was thrown together with very little in the way of research and analysis of the city departments. Cuts in spending she proposed had to be restored because they would have violated existing contracts and state laws. Her final budget denies funding to critical needs that will hamper the ability of the city to effectively carry out essential responsibilities. Rather than seriously engage in defending her cuts, she routinely imperiously dismissed concerns raised to her, reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Sanghvi’s final 2025 budget is notable for the money she obstinately cut for critical needs in the Public Safety and Mayor’s Department (coincidentally headed by the two people on the Council endorsed by the Republican party).

The following are a few of the budget requests from Safford and Coll that she refused to fund.

A SECOND RECORDS CLERK FOR THE POLICE DEPARTMENT

“Discovery” is a term that describes the responsibility of the city’s police department to provide persons charged with crimes with all relevant documents associated with their cases. Failure to do so can be grounds for dismissing the charges. After the state passed bail reform, the number of days to provide the documents was reduced to fifteen.

The Public Safety Department has had two “records clerks” responsible for this critical activity. One of the employees retired. Given the small window for discovery, only having one employee threatens the city’s ability to prosecute criminals effectively.

CERTIFICATION FOR CODE ENFORCERS

Code enforcement staff must attend training sessions to maintain their required certification. Sanghvi zeroed out the money for this and refused to restore it.

FIRE TRUCK MAINTENANCE

Sanghvi cut maintenance for the city’s fire engines from $160,000.00 to $60,000.00. According to the acting Fire Chief, this will not cover anticipated repairs.

POLICE CAR

The Police Department staggers the replacements for its twenty-five cars. Public Safety did not receive money to replace any vehicles this year; there is no money for next year. Sanghvi told Coll to take the money needed out of overtime. When she originally approved the overtime budget for 2025, she acknowledged the amount as appropriate given the plans to host the Belmont again, along with other special events in the city. To tell Coll to take money out of overtime now makes no sense.

A FULL-TIME CITY ATTORNEY

The city used to have a full-time and a part-time city attorney. In this litigious age, our legal department must be able to scrutinize contracts, respond to the many legal questions generated by the departments, and oversee the defense of the city when it is sued. Currently, the city has two part-time attorneys. Sanghvi has arrogantly refused to engage in serious discussion about why a full-time attorney is needed. “No” is not an analysis.

REPLACEMENT CAR FOR THE BUILDING INSPECTOR

The building department has a 2007 Impala. It is eighteen years old and, not surprisingly, has many miles on it. Sanghvi refuses to provide funds to replace it.

A MODEST RAISE FOR A LONG-TIME CITY EMPLOYEE

One of the mayor’s office positions is that of a part-time employee who has not had a raise in years. The mayor requested that the employee receive a $1.25 per hour raise, which was denied.

Sanghvi’s New Found Austerity

At a City Council budget discussion, Commissioner Sanghvi imperiously lectured Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll and Mayor John Safford, telling them the money was not there to help them and that they should do a better job managing their departments’ budgets. When Coll took the politically difficult position of suggesting she should consider increasing the city’s taxes if necessary to fund these needs, she summarily dismissed the idea.

This was a curious position for her to take as she has raised taxes every year she has been in office. In fact, her 2024 budget illegally exceeded the New York State tax cap due to an error in her calculations. She was required to work with the Comptroller’s Office to resolve the violation.

As Sanghvi has never resisted raising taxes until this most recent budget, I don’t think it is a coincidence that her sudden unexplained turn to austerity occurred while she was engaged in a failed run for the New York State Senate.

Sanghvi Competes With Moran For Toxicity

Commissioner Sanghvi has noted repeatedly that budgets are about priorities and values. This was never more evident than in the conflicts over this year’s budget.

When Sanghvi came into office in 2022, one of the first things she focused on was creating a program called “participatory budgeting.” Citizens submit ideas for community projects to a panel. The city then maintains a web option for people to vote on which ones to fund. After the public votes, the Council approves the funding for the winners. This year, Sanghvi budgeted $100,000 to be spent on these projects.

The many proposals under this program were all laudable, so voting against funding them was politically problematic. The easy way would have been to just vote yes to fund them all.

Both Coll and Safford, though, acting on principle, voted against funding the items in the “participatory budget.”

Commissioner Coll explained his no vote, stating, “In my view, the Department of Public Safety should be the No.1 priority of the city. I believe it was underfunded, so I’m not going to vote for the participatory budget because I think it’s a much, much, much lower priority.” Sanghvi, as stated earlier, spent $100,000 on participatory budgeting. Interestingly, this was the same amount she cut from a request for funds to maintain the city’s fire engines.

Likewise, Mayor Safford explained that he was in the midst of negotiating contracts with the city’s unions. He told his colleagues that it was problematic to say to employees there was not enough money for raises or healthcare benefits they were asking for while spending $100,000.00 for proposals that, while laudable, were not critical to the operation of the city. “One of the first things that (the union) brings up in my meetings is things like the participatory budgeting,” he told the Times Union. Likewise, Safford pointed out that requests from his department for more funding for the legal department, including money for a full-time attorney, had been denied by Sanghvi.

So, for Safford and Coll, it was not a matter of not funding projects such as community composting, a pollinator garden, or an outdoor learning center. The problem was, as Sanghvi herself so imperiously told them, everything can’t be funded, and while Coll had taken the politically risky position of supporting a 2% tax increase that would have gone a long way towards covering many of these competing needs, Sanghvi oddly for the first time since she took office refused to consider this.

Instead, Sanghvi’s response was to go to the media and personally attack her two colleagues. She made the following attacks in an article in the December 19, 2024, Times Union.

“A few days before Christmas, (Commissioner of Public Safety Tim) Coll and (Mayor John) Safford have shown us their true values,” Commissioner of Finance Minita Sanghvi said. “Adults who were upset that we had to have a level-funded budget and couldn’t fund every single thing on their wish list, decided to take that out on our children. … It’s cruelty for cruelty’s sake.”

Times Union December 19, 2024

“We can’t fund everything,” Sanghvi said. “In an ideal world, everyone would get a car. … But I wonder what kind of angry adult takes out their frustration with the budget on children a week before Christmas.”

What an incredible set of character attacks! How cavalierly Sanghvi accused Safford and Coll of being guilty of “…cruelty for cruelty’s sake” or that these two men had taken “out their frustration with the budget on children a week before Christmas.” Unfortunately, this kind of intemperate attack by her is all too common.

Sanghvi had a choice. She could have raised taxes to the 2% limit and funded most of the needs. She decided not to, which is her prerogative. It is sad for the city that she chose to attack fellow Council members in the media rather than simply acknowledge that they indeed had different priorities.

Sanghvi is fortunate that Safford and Coll demonstrated their professionalism and character by putting the need for tempered behavior to serve the city before responding to her in kind and descending themselves into this kind of shrill attack.

Sanghvi appears uninterested or oblivious to the problems her poorly crafted budgets have created. She would prefer to focus on her “participatory budgeting.” This is understandable. Its attraction is its simplicity. The proposals for this program are appealing and non-controversial. It is easy to give away money to worthy causes and to associate yourself with this kind of beneficence.

Crafting the city budget is highly complex and challenging. It requires many, many hours of meetings and analysis and involves conflicting demands for finite resources. When it is done right, a well-run city is achieved, but such success does not lend itself to dramatic headlines.

Sanghvi Has Utterly Failed To Properly Manage and Support The City’s IT Department

Besides crafting the city’s budgets, the Finance Commissioner is also responsible for running the Finance Department, which includes IT. Needless to say, how well the IT department is staffed and runs has a massive impact on the rest of city hall. This city has outstanding staff in our IT department. Jeff Cornick, the director of the IT department, is widely respected, and so are his people.

The problem is that the IT department has been badly understaffed for most of 2024. I understand that there are seven staff members in the department and that there are currently five vacancies.

This is a video of Mr. Cornick from July of this year. Only three positions were filled then, and one had just been hired. Mr. Cornick shares with the Public Service Commission the stress of being understaffed.

With so many vacancies, the city has depended on expensive outside consultants to support Mr. Cornick.

This situation should have been addressed long ago. The responsibility for addressing this crisis lies squarely with Commissioner Sanghvi. A chronic staff shortage in IT is inexcusable and has a profound impact on the ability of employees in other departments to properly do their work.

Sanghvi’s Responsibility for the Chronic Problems with FOIL

The Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requires municipalities to provide citizens with the requested documents. Beginning with the Kim administration, the city’s inability to meet this obligation has been chronic. In their defense, the demand for documents has risen exponentially. This has been no secret, yet the problems have been allowed to mushroom for the three years that Sanghvi has been the city’s Finance Director.

Under Sanghvi’s budgets, the city has had only one staff member, Robin McFee, buried beneath a blizzard of FOIL requests.

A number of the FOIL requests are for emails and texts.

The city has functioning software for searching its emails. It does not have a way of effectively capturing and archiving cell phone texts. This means that Ms. McFee has been reduced to requesting city officials and staff to take screenshots of texts on their phones relevant to FOIL requests. McFee cannot digitally search the city’s cell phones’ texts. She has no way of independently confirming that what, if anything, that they give her is accurate.

McFee has had to deal with two significant problems. First, officials and city employees are often slow to respond to her requests. This has necessitated her spending precious time chasing recalcitrant people. Worse, it is an honor system. There is no way to be sure that her requests are honestly handled.

This problem became acutely apparent when the Saratoga County Sheriff’s Department charged Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran with falsely signing certifications, claiming there were no texts relevant to a request from McFee.

Under Sanghvi, not only has the need for more staff to deal with FOIL requests not been addressed, but the understaffing in her IT department has made the situation even more acute.

SMARSH to the RESCUE?

For a while, the city appeared to have taken action to facilitate FOIL requests for texts.

On October 18, 2023, Mayor Ron Kim issued a press release announcing that the city had purchased a software service called SMARSH. In cooperation with Verizon, the city’s cell service provider, the software would capture all texts from city cell phones and index them to make them easy to search.

This software service would significantly improve the city’s ability to respond to FOIL requests and address one of the concerns raised in the New York State Attorney General’s report.

The cost to the city for SMARSH for the first year was $12,942.21.

Under Sanghvi, the IT department was responsible for implementing the program. In an interview on WRGB in February 2024, Sanghvi told the reporter that the city was implementing the program.

At a City Council meeting on September 3, 2024, Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran told the Council that Sanghvi had implemented SMARSH. Sanghvi was sitting next to him and said nothing to contradict him.

As of the date of this blog, December 28, 2024, over a year later, I have confirmed that SMARSH has never been implemented. That is over a year after the city purchased SMARSH. Sanghvi and Moran’s cavalier lying is stunning. They assume that no one will fact-check them, I guess.

The city paid $12,942.21 for the first of the software’s annual costs. SMARSH has virtually sat on the shelf unused, which is $12,942.21, thrown away uselessly. We are now into the second year during which the city is paying for SMARSH, which is still not operational.

In the meantime, the number of FOIL requests has continued to escalate.

When Guilty, Go On The Offensive

So, how has Sanghvi addressed the ongoing FOIL problem? By joining Dillon Moran in attacking Robin McFee, the person struggling to deal with the mess and provide the public with documents as best she can.

In the City Council video below, Mayor Safford attempts to get Sanghvi to come to his office to discuss her concerns about FOIL handling rather than carry on at the public meeting. He is trying to protect Ms. McFee from Sanghvi’s public attacks. Sanghvi will have none of it. Instead, to add to the theatrics, she warns the Mayor that she will audit the FOIL office if he refuses to discuss the issue publicly at the meeting. I find her behavior particularly disingenuous when Sanghvi goes on about the public importance of FOIL when she bears much of the responsibility for the problems.

The Loss Of Robin McFee

I cannot express enough my respect for Robin McFee. She is the city’s only employee who screens and responds to FOIL requests. She has soldiered through a challenging situation. The number of FOIL requests has been overwhelming. Each document must be reviewed to determine if it contains text exempt from the requirements of FOIL, and if so, it must be redacted. Some requests she has received were extensive and involved hundreds of documents.

This problem has been no secret. Past Mayor Ron Kim acknowledged the issue on numerous occasions. Despite Ms. McFee’s best efforts, it has been impossible to comply with the required response dates. I can speak from experience about delays. I always did my best to limit my requests as much as possible, and I always knew that Ms. McFee was doing her best.

As demonstrated by Dillon Moran in the following video of the Council meeting, some frustrated people seeking FOILs have not been as patient. Mayor Safford references Moran’s abusive behavior in the video clip. There was an incident in a corridor in city hall where Moran accosted Ms. McFee over a late FOIL.

I will admit to the readers of this blog the fury I have felt listening to Sanghvi and Moran publicly attack McFee’s work. The lack of respect and courtesy is terrible, but knowing that Sanghvi has failed to get SMARSH up or provide additional help for Ms. McFee makes Sanghvi’s attacks incredibly cynical and cruel.

When viewing this video, remember Sanghvi’s failure to implement SMARSH and her indifference to the staff shortage to meet the city’s FOIL obligations.

The stress on Ms. McFee was exacerbated by the cruel behavior of both Dillon Moran and Minita Sanghvi. Moran used the platform of City Council meetings to accuse Ms. McFee of incompetence and even implied political interference. Sanghvi piled on to support Moran and his narrative. When Mayor Safford intervened, suggesting that Moran and Sanghvi should not be attacking a city employee during the City Council meeting and that this discussion would best be carried out in his office, Sanghvi upped the ante. She told the Mayor that if he refused to discuss the issue at the Council table, she would use her authority to audit McFee’s work. It should be no surprise to readers then that Sanghvi did not bring this resolution forward at the next meeting. It’s all about theater.

Given the long history of the lack of resources in that department, this call for an audit has more to do with public relations than a genuine interest in the problem. This cynicism is best revealed by the fact that Sanghvi has never spoken to McFee in the three years she has been Commissioner. If she had, she would have known that Ms. McFee had kept extensive detailed documentation of the FOIL requests received and when and how they were answered. But Commissioner Sanghvi preferred to engage in public theatrics at Ms. McFee’s expense.

This feels like the lynching Marilyn Rivers, the previous director of Risk and Safety, was subjected to. It then came as no surprise to learn last week that Ms. McFee has resigned, effective December 31, 2024. This city will again have lost an extraordinarily valuable employee, leaving it with no dedicated staff to handle FOILs.

Now, another vital employee has joined Marilyn Rivers, Tina Carton, Vince DeLeonardis, and Lisa Ribis, among others, in the exodus from our city that began with the Ron Kim administration, two of whom from that unfortunate period still remain on the Council-Moran and Sanghvi.

More Mismanagement by Sanghvi

The city’s website is supposed to provide the public with easy access to records. Readers following this blog will be aware that I write software and that during the previous administration, I repeatedly wrote to Commissioner Sanghvi that there were significant flaws in the design of the city’s website. These problems have continued into her second term in office.

For the last three years, I have received emails and calls from people asking for help, for instance, in finding past Council meeting records. Four places on the site supposedly have links to the city’s Council meeting archives.

The following is just one of the four pages on the city’s website that are all supposed to take you to the archive. In this case, here is the page where the link is supposed to be.

Here is the page it brings you to. Notice that this page has no links to city council meetings after June 2024.

This is symptomatic of her “management.” She is simply uninterested in the unsexy aspects of being the Commissioner of Finance. How else can one explain how this fault has been allowed to exist during her tenure without correction?

The Future for Sanghvi

Sources tell us that, fortunately, Sanghvi may not run again for Finance Commissioner but instead turn her attention to a run for County Supervisor. If that proves to be the case, there will be one of two outcomes: she loses and no longer holds a public office, or she wins and becomes the county’s problem. In the meantime, the city must endure another year of her mismanagement.