Delaware County Supervisor Marjorie Miller told in the interview to New York State Comptroller's auditor that two contracts made by Delaware County may have been given to friends of the multi-year Chairman of the County Board of Supervisors Mr. Eisel, one, an overpriced contract to a coroner, and another, a contract for the lease of the Treadwell school building.
That is what I know from public records.
What I also know from the same set of documents received from the NYS Comptroller's office that for years, Delaware County employees were not asked to sign conflict of interest disclosures, while for over 30 years Delaware County engaged in a one vendor per service no-bid contracting "system", renewable automatically without public input and without input by the entire legislature, by the Board of Supervisors' "committees" alone.
Moreover, Marjorie Miller said in her interview that oftentimes she was requested to approve budgets without seeing them.
So, Marjorie Miller already spotted the overpriced contract of the County with the coroner (Dr. Ucci, I believe), who Marjorie Miller identified as a friend of the Delaware County Board of Supervisors Mr. Eisel.
Lack of competition in contracts and lack of disclosures of conflicts of interests for 30 years, in a county best characterized as "a land of kissing cousins", where no no-nepotism (prohibition on hiring relatives) policy in employment exists, must necessarily lead to overpriced public contracts.
Those public contracts are financed by you, ladies and gentlemen, taxpayers of Delaware County.
Each year for those 30 years while running those no-bid contracts, Delaware County foreclosed on delinquent county-tax taxpayers and took many homes from Delaware County property owners.
Recently, Delaware County Department of Social Services Commissioner William Moon was caught in buying up such a foreclosed property through his wife who has a different last name.
I wonder how many more of those buy-ups existed over the years of no-bid contracts, but Mr. Moon, apparently relying on his connections in the government and, likely, on the contracts to influential people he distributed over the years, escaped criminal and civil liability for his misconduct.
He only very quickly resigned, as did Judge Carl Becker, who was the legal advisor of Commissioner Moon for many years while the no-bid contract system was in existence and knew his many secrets, if not participated in Moon's little "inside trading" in real estate foreclosed by the County and in doling out contracts to family and friends.
It is my firm belief that support by the well-known corrupt judge Becker derailed judicial election campaign of his student, colleague and subordinate, now County Attorney Porter Kirkwood in the past judicial elections to the Family Court seat this year.
I wonder if property owners whose properties were foreclosed over the period of 30 years will now start questioning propriety of foreclosures to feed the corrupt inflated budgets of Delaware County that was made to accommodate inflated contract prices to family and friends of Delaware County government officials - under the guise of "helping" Delaware County in foregoing public bidding, because Delaware County has "small population" and "lacks economic resources" to verify whether contracts for services paid for with taxpayers' money, are provided at the best available prices.
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