Month: January 2026

The Police Report on the On-Call Debacle: A Postmortem

I submitted a FOIL request of the New York State Police for the investigation they performed into the Saratoga Springs’ On-Call scandal. After many months, I finally received the investigation report. For readers unfamiliar with the scandal that precipitated the investigation, here is the link from an earlier post. There are actually multiple posts on this fiasco. Using the search function in the blog, search for “on-call” for more stories.

The investigator from the State Police was Andrew Werner, who has since retired. Werner did an excellent job of determining what happened and who might be culpable.

The investigation confirmed that someone altered the resolution authorizing on-call pay for deputies, but Werner was unable to determine who changed the resolution, so no one was charged.

Nevertheless, the investigation did include some interesting revelations.

City Attorney David Harper Confirmed that The Council Resolution Posted As The Official Record Of The Meeting Was Inconsistent From The Video Record Of The Meeting

Classic Lying By Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran

Those of us who have dealt with former Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran are acquainted with his bizarre pattern of lying about things when the embarrassing truth exposing his lying is readily available.

In this case, Moran contacted Werner, telling him that he had a report documenting who had doctored the resolution. He claimed that it was done by an employee in his department whom he had fired.

Falsehood number one was that the late Lisa Ribis, the employee, was fired. I have documented Moran’s cruel obsession with harassing Ms. Ribis. In fact, Ms. Ribis was protected under civil service. He was only able to suspend her with pay pending a hearing on his charges. Ms. Ribis was highly regarded in City Hall. John Franck, who served as Accounts Commissioner, told this blogger of his high regard for Ms. Ribis. This same post chronicled Moran’s harassment of Ms. Ribis.

Before her hearing could be convened and after months being suspended with pay, Ms. Ribis was diagnosed with cancer. Having served the city for decades, she was able to retire, and the charges against her were dropped. Lisa Ribis was never fired.

According to the police report, Moran told the investigator in a telephone call that an outside computer company had investigated the matter and issued a report documenting that Ribis was the perpetrator.

When the report was not forthcoming, the investigator contacted Moran’s attorney to ask when Moran would be turning it over.

Attorney Dan Alonzo returned my call. Writer[Werner] inquired when Commissioner Moran would turn over the internal report from the Accounts Department on the employee who had been editing the City records without their permission. Attorney Alonzo advised that there was no report generated and it is his belief that internal investigation was a separate investigation that had nothing to do with the current state police investigation. I advised Attorney Alonzo that his client, Commissioner Moran, was the one who brought the report to my attention and the commissioner told me that he was going to turn that information over to the State Police. Attorney Alonzo advised that he needed to speak to his client again and would get back to me.

State Police Report

Moran never produced the report because it never existed and he made the whole thing up.

The Improper Payments And Missing Restitution

While the investigation was unable to determine who doctored the minutes, it did reveal that two deputies had been improperly paid. The redacted names of these deputies were Stacy Connors, Moran’s deputy, and Angela Rella, Mayor Ron Kim’s deputy. The resolution language authorized that the benefit would become effective in mid-February. These two women submitted requests for payment for the prior six weeks and were paid by the Finance Department, despite the resolution not authorizing it.

The attorneys representing Rella and Connors acknowledged the improper payments, and the city subsequently received checks representing restitution.

Then Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi acknowledged to Werner that the two women were improperly paid. These checks were never deposited in the city’s accounts. Readers who follow this blog will remember that this blogger made numerous attempts to find out from Sanghvi why she never deposited them. To this date, Sanghvi has never been willing to explain to the public why she allowed these women to keep their ill-gotten gains.

Moving On

As Moran and Sanghvi are no longer on the Council, all of this ends up being moot, except hopefully, their careers as elected officials on the City Council are over.

The Full Report

Kaufmann_Redacted_ReportDownload

The Death Of Renee Good And The Threat To Our Democratic Institutions

The death of Renee Good in Minneapolis was shocking. I will not offer my own opinion on the specific facts of the incident. Debating competing interpretations drawn from a maze of videos risks obscuring the larger and more consequential issues.

Flawed as our judicial process may be at times, it remains the bulwark between some measure of justice and the chaos and violence that arise in its absence. Public faith in the fairness and integrity of this system is essential to the maintenance of civil society. Once people lose faith in the judicial process, the trust that binds us together as a nation erodes, with all the dangers that entails.

What is most disturbing to me in this case is the apparent collapse of the safeguards that have traditionally governed the use of governmental force. The authority granted to law enforcement to use deadly force has always carried with it a corresponding responsibility on the part of the state to ensure that such power is exercised lawfully and is not abused.

Historically, incidents involving deadly force have been followed by procedures designed to protect the rights of all involved. Standard practice has typically included removing the officer from public-facing duties and initiating a rigorous, independent investigation. Every effort should be made to assemble an investigative team whose credentials maximize objectivity, to ensure the fairest possible outcome and to build public confidence in the process, regardless of the result. Under the best circumstances, such investigations also seek to identify lessons that can reduce the likelihood of future deaths.

For better or worse, citizens have long been required to place their faith in prosecutors and the courts to ensure accountability and justice. In fairness to both the victim and the officer, public officials have generally refrained from making definitive statements about culpability to avoid compromising ongoing investigations.

Readers may recall the shooting that occurred in downtown Saratoga Springs in November 2022. At that time, a public dispute arose between then-Mayor Ron Kim and then-Public Safety Commissioner James Montagnino on one side, and then–County District Attorney Karen Heggen on the other, concerning what—if anything—public officials should say following the discharge of weapons and the resulting injuries.

A Profoundly Frightening Situation

To date, these longstanding safeguards appear to have been disregarded in Ms. Good’s death.

The officer who killed Ms. Good was employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security. Within hours of her death, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem publicly condemned Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist” and exonerated the officer who shot her. President Trump issued a similar statement.

Most troubling was Vice President JD Vance’s assertion that the officer involved enjoyed “total immunity.” Significant jurisdictional questions remain about which authorities are responsible for investigating this case. It is possible that the Vice President intended to make a narrower statement about immunity from state or local investigation rather than federal review. However, he has offered no clarification. In the absence of such clarification, one is left to conclude that he believes the decision to use lethal force rests solely within the discretion of ICE officers.

Such a pronouncement is deeply troubling. No one—regardless of rank, agency, or position—has the right to take a life with impunity. Ultimately, determinations of culpability must rest with an independent and impartial authority.

Equally disturbing is the fact that, six days later, there has been no public indication that an independent investigation has been initiated. As far as can be determined, the officer involved has continued in regular duties.

I recognize that some may dismiss these concerns as hysterical. I would instead pose a simple question: who now decides when the government may lawfully take a life? Under what circumstances can the public expect the use of deadly force by law enforcement to be meaningfully scrutinized?

Some Thoughts on ICE

Becoming a police officer in our city requires extensive training and oversight. Officers must complete six months of instruction at the state police academy, followed by an additional two months of field training under the supervision of a senior officer.

Equally important is departmental culture. “Protect and Serve” is not merely a slogan. Local police officers perform many roles beyond arresting criminals. They assist injured residents before emergency medical personnel arrive, manage public events to ensure safety, and build relationships with schools and downtown businesses. While many officers cannot afford to live in the city, departmental leadership works to integrate them into the community.

Our police department has an outstanding record of service. Despite frequent criticism, a sober review reveals few substantiated claims of abuse by individual officers over many years. I am particularly struck by the fact that during the extensive demonstrations following the death of George Floyd, there were no reported injuries—despite highly provocative verbal abuse directed at officers. That outcome reflects effective training and strong leadership.

ICE, by contrast, operates under a very different model. Its primary responsibility is the arrest of individuals. This is inherently difficult work. Many people arrested for being in the country illegally have lived here for decades and are respected members of their communities. The New York Times once reported on a waitress in a small Midwestern farming town who had lived there for seventeen years. When she was detained, the community reacted with outrage.

The purpose of this observation is not to debate immigration policy. Rather, it is to acknowledge that making arrests is stressful under any circumstances—and especially so when those being arrested are well known and valued in their communities.

That stress is compounded by extended travel away from home and by the routine use of masks, which can foster fear and isolation from the public. Being an ICE officer is neither glamorous nor easy.

Given these realities, proper training is essential—not only to perform the job effectively, but also to prepare agents emotionally for the pressures they face. ICE training was once comparable in length to that of local police, lasting six to seven months. However, in the rush to deploy personnel, it has reportedly been reduced to just forty-seven days.

There appears to have been no compelling justification for this haste. Local police departments generally do an effective job maintaining public safety. Given the millions of undocumented individuals in the United States—many of whom have lived here peacefully for years—there is no rational basis for curtailing the training and support that ICE agents both need and deserve to carry out their duties responsibly.

Disregarding the Law

The country now finds itself in a precarious position. If Vice President Vance’s remarks are not publicly rebuked or clarified, where does that leave us? If the Department of Homeland Security can appear to disregard established norms of justice and fairness, where else might the government abuse its considerable power?

Anecdotally, I have friends who support the MAGA movement who believe the ICE officer acted appropriately in shooting Ms. Good. At the same time, many of them acknowledge that a rigorous and impartial investigation should have taken place. When righteousness and anger overwhelm fairness and accountability, the foundations of democracy itself is put at risk.

City Reaches Agreement With Attorney General Over 1st Amendment Rights of Protesters

The city of Saratoga Springs has been in negotiations with the New York State Attorney General’s Office (OAG) for eighteen months over an agreement called an Assurance of Discontinuance or an AOD.

The AOD’s purpose was to address how the city should deal with the criticisms of how the police handled BLM demonstrations in 2021. The OAG’s report on the handing of these demonstrations, “A Report on the Saratoga Springs Police Department Response to Protests in 2021”, included extreme and sometimes false allegations based on several instances of intemperate remarks by two city officials that were exploited to describe Saratoga Springs as a city so marked by racism and violence that it sounded like Selma, Alabama, in 1965. The many problems with this report were explored in a previous post in February 26, 2024

Both the city and the OAG were trying to reach an agreement on which actions the city would be required to take to to avoid litigation.

The original draft of an AOD agreement to address the report’s allegations contained a litany of reforms that sparked considerable disagreement between the city and the OAG. The problems with the original draft were explored in detail in a previous post from June 26, 2024.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll, his deputy Dan Charleson, Police Chief Tyler MacIntosh, Assistant Chief Frederick Warfield, and James Potter of Hinman Straub (hired as counsel by the city) all worked with the OAG staff in the negotiations. Over time, the two groups established trust in each other, and both worked hard to craft a revised document that would yield policies that would enhance both the department and the community in maintaining the city’s law enforcement capabilities while protecting the constitutional rights of all.

The final agreement, which the City Council approved unanimously at its January 6, 2026, meeting, is radically different from the original OAG proposals.

Highlights Of The Revised Agreement

  1. The original AOD stated that police on bikes could not be used for crowd control. That language was later removed.
  1. The original draft specified that the throwing of water bottles did not justify an arrest. That provision was removed.
  1. The Original draft prevented the SSPD from charging demonstrators with low-level offenses after the conclusion of the demonstration. The final agreement now allows the SSPD to bring low-level charges after a demonstration has been concluded. An Independent Oversight Official approved by the OAG will review these charges should they occur.
  1. The original draft contained overly broad language that would have precluded the Public Safety Commissioner from influencing the department’s actions. The language was tweaked to say that the Public Safety Commissioner would not “improperly” influence the department.
  2. The original draft banned the use of mounted police. In the final version, horse-mounted police are permitted at First Amendment assemblies only in positions at the back ranks of the police presence and shall not be used for crowd control, except in an emergency when necessary to ensure the safety of police officers and demonstrators.
  3. The original language precluded any surveillance of protesters. Paragraph 57 now states that the city is prohibited from conducting surveillance based solely on engagement in First Amendment activity. This is consistent with federal Attorney General Guidelines.
  4. The draft required that public comment shall be moved to the end of City Council meetings. When it was pointed out that the public would be frustrated by not being allowed to comment on resolutions prior to their adoption at Council meetings, it was agreed that the language would be changed from “shall” to “may.”
  5. The AOD affirms that the City may enforce the demonstration declaration and has agreed to remove any potential jail sentence. As such, enforcement will be based on fines. Spontaneous demonstrations are permitted and have been upheld in federal cases. The AOD clearly defines a spontaneous demonstration as one that occurs in response to news or events that come into public knowledge less than 48 hours prior to the demonstration.
  1. SSPD should advance to Tier 4 (arrest) only when demonstrators have refused to comply with dispersal orders issued at Tier 3. Dispersal orders must be read three times, with five-minute intervals, between each warning. If an emergency exists, SSPD may instruct demonstrators to disperse immediately.
  1. The new language requires the city to establish a senior officer to be responsible for internal affairs. They would be trained to effectively monitor and manage disciplinary actions against officers charged with violations. Paragraph 73 indicates that we need a Captain or higher designated as an Internal Affairs Officer, which will require a new hire for the SSPD.

A Win For All

Given the highly charged nature of the issues, it is a testament to both the city and the OAG that patience and commitments to both the Constitution and the need for effective law enforcement led to an agreement that benefits the city and all its residents.

Lew Benton’s Forensic Analysis Of Minita Sanghvi’s Budgets Reveals The Silent Deterioration Of The City’s Finances

[Lew Benton (the picture is not of Lew) has done a tremendous service to our community in analyzing Saratoga Springs Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi’s budgets during her tenure in office. Lew documents how Sanghvi’s arbitrary numbers have “baked in” deficits into the city’s finances and have left the city in a deep financial hole for others to try to dig out of. His assessment? She has routinely violated her fiduciary obligations.]

From Lew Benton

The “Participatory Budgeting” process was ill-conceived from the start, but in the final analysis, its impact on the city’s fiscal health was insignificant when compared to the structural deficits built into the spending plans of the last few years.

With the advent of the Sanghvi administration four years ago, the city began preparing and adopting operating budgets with baked-in deficits.  This was not unique, but each successive budgeting cycle since 2023 has consistently and increasingly underestimated expenditures and overestimated revenues.

The 2023 and 2024 budgets even included a non-existent $250,000 cannabis tax revenue.  But finance’s biggest budgeting sin has been underestimating major operating costs. Initially, in the preparation of the 2023 budget, a council majority made up of new members, including the budget officer, could be given some empathy.  But in preparing the 2024 budget, the finance commissioner failed to reverse course.

No doubt, the lack of institutional knowledge and limited understanding of how this government functions among a council composed of first-term members could temper the inadequacies in the 2023 budget.  But failure to recognize and correct them going forward was unacceptable and violatedher fiduciary responsibility.  

And that failure was aggravated by her inexplicable decision to present the then-proposed 2024 budget in a form wholly inconsistent with the requirements of the City Charter.

Rather than, as outlined in the Charter,  follow a standardized budget format that employs “ …  the most feasible combination of expenditure classifications by funds, organization unit, program, purpose, or activity and object,” all proposed expenditure lines were lumped together, not disaggregated by function.

Attempting to understand and compare the commissioner’s proposed amended 2024 budget with previous spending plans was as perplexing as Alan Turing’s early efforts to crack the Enigma Code.

The Charter requires a budget presentation that is transparent, relatively simple, and allows and encourages understanding.  The commissioner’s amended budget format was opaque.  

For example, several “department” expenditure lines under the auspices of the mayor were simply thrown together, co-mingled.  The reviewer was left to divine which line items are part of which of the mayor’s several department budgets: i.e., City Attorney, Planning, Building, Human Resources, etc.  

The same was true for Finance, Accounts, Public Safety, and Public Works.  In the latter two, Public Safety and Public Works, the task of meaningful, comprehensive review of the budgets of discrete functions: i.e., fire services, policing, EMS, etc., required substantial investment in time and enough working knowledge to assign each line item to its respective agency.

In the mayor’s proposed budget, there were at least seven expenditure lines labeled “Professional Services,” but the only way to determine which department each line applied to required a time-consuming, tedious matching of account numbers.

Why finance elected to abandon a budget format that had always been relatively easy to read and understand, in favor of one significantly more difficult to puzzle out, is itself a conundrum. 

The 2024 City Comprehensive Budget would eventually require significant amendments to avoid operating deficits, at the expense of the City’s fund balance.

First and foremost, it included unfavorable budget variances in both major revenue and expenditure accounts.    

That all came on the heels of a 2023 budget that preordained the 2024 proposal’s many overstated anticipated revenues and, in some cases, grossly underfunded expenditure lines.  

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, rang 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 deliberately low-balling major expenditures invites deficit spending.

The following are examples of the unfavorable variances in the 2024 operating budget. 

Revenues

In Finance, $850,000 in Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue was 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 in 2023.

The 2023 budget included 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 prematurely including the revenue in the 2023 budget only added to a negative revenue variance

The proposed Mortgage Tax revenue for 2024 was $1.5 million compared to the $933,400 collected to date in 2023.  The $933,400 was far below the $2.05 million budgeted. 

The mayor’s budget was ripe with unfavorable 2024 revenue variances.  The Building Permit account carried a proposed $700,000 revenue even in the face of a major decline in permit revenues in 2023. 

Likewise, Planning Board fees were 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 Finance projected it would fall $35,000 short.  

The Public Safety revenue budget included 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.

Parking Enforcement revenue was anticipated to be $462,0000 this in 2023, 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 2023 and 2024 budgets contributed to the city’s present fiscal dilemma, so have what appear to be unfavorable variances in the operating budgets.

In the 2023 Public Safety operating budget, the City Council included $190,000 for Fire Fighter Overtime, but finance projected that by the end of the fiscal year, $533,500 would be spent, which was an astronomical increase of $343,500 over the amount budgeted.

Similarly, the Firefighter Compensation Time budget was anticipated to be overspent.  Only $190,000 was earmarked for this line in the 2023 budget but $563,000 was anticipated to be spent by year’s end, a $373.000 overage.

So too is the proposed 2024 Police Overtime and Compensation Time lines grossly underfunded.  Finance proposed to appropriate the rather odd amount of $263,637 for Compensation Time vis-à-vis the $483,570 spent in 2022 and the projected $450,000 in 2023.  The 2024 OT line is set at $325,000, compared with the $507,505 expended in 2022 and the then-estimated $450,000 in 2024.

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 were $1,981,000.

This pattern has only continued in the course of preparing and adopting the 2025 and now the 2026 budgets. I do not envy the challenges faced by the 2026 council.