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Remember our Shepard family saga published here last month and post election?
Well, dear readers, the Brother Bunnies have outdone themselves.
**SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!**
And what a beautiful family reunion it is.
On November 10, 2026, the Delaware County Board of Supervisors approved Resolution No. 165, authorizing a $600,000 settlement in *Decker Advertising, Inc. v. Delaware County*, No. 3:23-cv-01531 (N.D.N.Y.).
Decker Advertising is owned by Randy Shepard, publisher of *The Reporter* and brother of Wayne Shepard, who was elected Town of Hamden Supervisor on November 3, 2026.
The lawsuit had been promoted as a grand constitutional battle over freedom of the press.
I have another name for it.
**A NEPOTISM SPAT DRESSED UP AS A FIRST AMENDMENT CASE.**
The underlying controversy concerned a publicly funded business relationship between Delaware County and a newspaper owned by the brother of a longtime senior county official.
A relationship that should have been examined for conflicts of interest before the County ever awarded the business.
A relationship that should have been challenged when the newspaper demanded its restoration.
And a lawsuit that should not have been allowed to consume nearly three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars without confronting that fundamental issue.
But then, confronting the issue would have required Delaware County to examine its own contracting practices.
And apparently, that was a little too much to ask.
## I. Thirty Years Representing the County — and Frank Miller Somehow Missed the Shepard Brothers?
Let us begin with the attorney.
Frank W. Miller of Hancock Estabrook LLP has represented Delaware County for approximately thirty years.
Thirty years.
Not thirty days.
Not three months.
**THIRTY YEARS.**
An attorney with that history does not arrive in Delaware County as a stranger to its officials, its contracts, its political relationships, or the businesses receiving county money.
Wayne Shepard spent decades employed by Delaware County, including as Director of the Office for the Aging.
His brother Randy owned the publishing enterprise that received county business.
Wayne's own deposition addressed printing expenditures involving his brother's enterprise.
The family relationship was not a secret.
The government employment was not a secret.
The county business was not a secret.
And yet, in defending Decker Advertising's federal lawsuit, the County's attorneys did not squarely confront the conflict of interest underlying the business relationship the plaintiff wanted restored.
Why?
That is the question I have been asking.
And Miller's thirty years representing the County make the omission considerably more difficult to attribute to ignorance.
I consider his handling of this litigation an extraordinary example of professional incompetence compounded by conduct that warrants investigation for knowing deception and misuse of public resources.
Because the problem was not simply that Miller failed to find a useful legal argument.
**The problem was that the omitted argument threatened to expose the very municipal contracting practices with which a thirty-year county attorney would have been intimately familiar.**
What a remarkably inconvenient defense.
## II. The County Was Entitled to Stop the Nepotism — Not Pay $600,000 to Continue It
The First Amendment protects freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
It does not entitle a newspaper to a government contract obtained or maintained through an unlawful conflict of interest.
The fundamental question was whether Delaware County had lawfully awarded and maintained its business relationship with Decker Advertising while the publisher's brother occupied senior positions in county government.
New York General Municipal Law Article 18 regulates conflicts of interest in municipal contracting, including the treatment of official newspaper designations.
I addressed those statutory provisions in my November 3 publication.
The County should have examined the original transactions and confronted the conflict at the outset.
It could have acknowledged its own failure to scrutinize the relationship when the business was first awarded.
It could have defended discontinuation of the designation on the ground that the underlying contractual arrangement was objectionable under municipal law, rather than because of the newspaper's editorial content.
It could have brought the contractual issue before the federal court and opposed restoration of the arrangement.
Instead, the County allowed the controversy to proceed for nearly three years as a purported First Amendment dispute.
The longer the litigation continued, the more legal expenses accumulated.
And the more expensive the case became, the more attractive a settlement could be made to appear.
**An avoidable contracting controversy became a lucrative legal enterprise.**
For the lawyers, certainly.
For Delaware County taxpayers?
Not so much.
## III. I Offered to Help Miller. They Settled Instead.
On November 3, 2026, I published:
*The Return of the Prodigal Son — and a Curious Possibility of Taxpayer Intervention in Decker Advertising v. Delaware County.*
I examined whether a Delaware County taxpayer could intervene under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24 on the County's side to oppose prospective relief restoring the disputed municipal business relationship.
Yes, on the County's side.
The side represented by Frank Miller.
An attorney whose conduct I have criticized for years, and whose client Delaware County I have sued.
Nevertheless, I was prepared to consider assisting the County in protecting taxpayers against the restoration of a questionable family-connected contract.
I publicly identified the conflict of interest, the potential taxpayer interest, and the failure of existing counsel to confront the underlying contractual issue.
I ended the article with a question for Mr. Miller:
**WHY DIDN'T YOU RAISE THAT CONFLICT IMMEDIATELY? YOU COULD HAVE SAVED DELAWARE COUNTY TAXPAYERS ZILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!!!! MILKIN' THE CASE MUCH, HUH?**
That was November 3, at 8:59 p.m.
On November 4, I published Part Three of *OH, WHAT A WAYNE!!!*, examining the Shepard family's municipal positions, contracting relationships, and reactions to my reporting.
And on November 10, the Board of Supervisors approved the $600,000 settlement.
One week.
I cannot help wondering what urgency suddenly descended upon the County.
Was the prospect of an independent taxpayer appearing in federal court and raising the conflict that its own attorneys had neglected becoming a little too real?
What would happen if the federal court were asked to examine the original contracts?
What would happen if discovery turned toward the County's broader contracting practices?
What would happen if someone asked why its thirty-year attorney had failed to raise the conflict?
And what would happen if the litigation stopped being a glamorous constitutional controversy and became an inquiry into the distribution of public contracts among connected local families?
**Perhaps the possibility of an unexpected ally was more alarming to the County than another adversary.**
Especially an ally who intended to ask questions.
## IV. $27,937.93 in Damages. $600,000 in Settlement. Who Is Protecting the Taxpayers?
Now let us examine the money.
According to the published settlement allocation:
| Component | Amount |
|---|---:|
| Compensatory damages | $27,937.93 |
| Attorney's fees | $423,297.92 |
| Litigation costs | $148,764.15 |
| **TOTAL** | **$600,000.00** |
There it is.
The parties allocated **$27,937.93 to compensatory damages**.
And **$572,062.07 to attorney's fees and litigation costs**.
The total settlement is approximately **21.48 times the compensatory damages**.
More than twenty-one times.
Decker Advertising was represented by Greenberg Traurig LLP.
The $423,297.92 attorney-fee allocation is more than fifteen times the compensatory damages.
The separate $148,764.15 litigation-cost allocation exceeds those damages more than fivefold.
And these are the plaintiff's settlement allocations.
They do not include the County's own defense expenses.
Now consider the duty of public officials and their attorneys to protect municipal resources.
The County had an identifiable conflict-of-interest issue to investigate and present.
Its attorneys failed to make that issue central to the defense.
The litigation continued for nearly three years.
And the County ultimately approved a settlement in which more than 95% of the amount was allocated to lawyers and litigation expenses.
**Why should Delaware County taxpayers finance the consequences of their government's failure to confront a conflict of interest at the beginning of the litigation?**
Why should they pay for years of legal proceedings that could have been avoided through competent examination of the original municipal contracts?
And why should the attorneys who failed to raise the issue escape scrutiny of their own financial incentives and professional conduct?
These are questions of taxpayer waste, not merely litigation strategy.
## V. This Is a Poor County. Property Taxes Are Not Voluntary Donations.
There is something particularly offensive about this expenditure.
Delaware County is a rural county with limited economic resources and many residents who cannot casually absorb additional property-tax burdens.
These are not people living in a financial abstraction called a municipal budget.
They are homeowners, retirees, farmers, working families, and small-business owners.
For many, property taxes are a substantial financial obligation.
And property taxes are not voluntary.
A homeowner cannot simply decline to contribute to the County's legal expenses.
Unpaid property taxes can become enforceable liens, followed by tax foreclosure proceedings and ultimately the loss of the property.
**That is the coercive machinery behind municipal revenue collection.**
A homeowner who cannot pay may lose the home.
Yet county officials can approve hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation expenditures arising from contracting practices that should have been scrutinized years earlier.
The contrast becomes even more offensive when officials responsible for public expenditures approve increases in their own compensation while the County's residents bear compulsory tax burdens.
The public is entitled to examine those compensation decisions alongside the County's litigation spending.
The $600,000 settlement is not an abstract number.
It represents resources that could otherwise remain with taxpayers or be used for legitimate public needs.
Instead, the settlement allocates $572,062.07 to attorney's fees and litigation costs.
**People can lose their homes for failing to pay taxes that support a system in which public officials permit avoidable litigation to consume hundreds of thousands of dollars.**
That is why the original conflict of interest matters.
That is why the failure to raise it matters.
And that is why the settlement deserves taxpayer scrutiny.
## VI. The County “EXPECTS” Insurance to Pay. EXPECTS!
Now comes the most remarkable feature of Resolution No. 165.
According to the published report, Delaware County maintains liability insurance and **expects** its insurance carrier to pay the costs incurred in defending the lawsuit, together with the substantial majority of the settlement amount.
**EXPECTS!**
Not *has obtained the insurer's approval*.
Not *the insurer has committed to payment*.
Not *the insurer has paid*.
EXPECTS.
And the County approved the settlement anyway.
Notice the two separate financial categories.
First, the costs incurred **IN DEFENDING THE LAWSUIT**.
Second, the **SUBSTANTIAL MAJORITY OF THE $600,000 SETTLEMENT**.
The defense expenses are additional to the settlement.
How much did Hancock Estabrook and other defense counsel charge?
Who approved those invoices?
How much has the insurer already paid?
What amount of the settlement has actually been accepted for coverage?
What is Delaware County's remaining financial obligation?
And why did the Board approve the settlement without publicly identifying a confirmed insurance commitment?
The report does not answer these questions.
Nor does it identify the insurer.
But the Board approved the $600,000 obligation.
One wonders why it was so important to approve the settlement before publicly resolving the insurance questions.
And let us dispense with the comforting fiction that insurance means taxpayers do not pay.
Municipalities finance insurance through premiums and contributions.
Those expenditures are made from public budgets.
Public budgets are supported by compulsory taxation.
Insurance does not magically turn an unlawful private benefit into a lawful public expenditure.
**The money does not become free merely because a municipal insurer writes the check.**
## VII. Fortunately, I Already Sued NYMIR
Here is the particularly entertaining part.
On October 2, 2026, more than a month before the Decker settlement, I commenced *Neroni v. New York Municipal Insurance Reciprocal et al.*, Nassau County Supreme Court, Index No. 621856/2026.
The defendants are New York Municipal Insurance Reciprocal (NYMIR), Hancock Estabrook LLP, Frank W. Miller, Esq., and Ryan M. Poplawski, Esq.
My action challenges municipal insurance financing of private legal representation.
The original transaction concerns Wayne Marshfield, Town of Hamden supervisor.
In a sworn affidavit dated March 31, 2026, Marshfield stated that he had been sued in his private capacity, was not entitled to municipal insurance coverage for his defense, and had been denied such coverage through the Town's attorneys.
Yet an August 13, 2026 court filing included an $8,192.70 Hancock Estabrook invoice addressed to NYMIR for legal services provided by Miller and Poplawski.
That contradiction is central to my taxpayer-waste action.
The lawsuit invokes Article VIII, § 1 of the New York Constitution, the prohibition against unlawful gifts or loans of municipal funds or credit to private individuals.
It also asserts Judiciary Law § 487 claims against the participating attorneys.
I seek declaratory and injunctive relief, recovery of unlawfully expended public funds, and damages.
And now Delaware County has approved another substantial litigation-related financial transaction.
The same County.
The same litigation counsel, Frank Miller.
A $600,000 settlement involving a family-connected municipal business relationship.
And an expectation that municipal liability insurance will finance both defense expenses and most of the settlement.
**The Decker settlement is an excellent new subject for examination in connection with my pending taxpayer-waste litigation.**
I intend to pursue the relevant insurance records, coverage determinations, settlement authorizations, invoices, payments, and allocation of financial responsibility.
The identity of the insurer will be important.
So will the underlying settlement agreement.
So will the County's legal authority to assume the obligations being discharged.
The federal parties' settlement does not adjudicate the legality of those expenditures for purposes of an independent taxpayer challenge.
Nor does approval by the Board of Supervisors answer the constitutional questions.
The $600,000 settlement supplies a new financial transaction to investigate.
And I already have a lawsuit addressing municipal insurance practices.
**What a fortunate procedural coincidence.**
## VIII. Even the Taxpayers on Facebook Are Asking Who Pays
The public reaction to the settlement has been revealing.
On social media, taxpayers do not mince words.
They are calling for disbarment of Delaware County Attorney Amy Merklen -
and for forcing those who caused this lotigation to pay for it out of
Their own personal pockets.
Notice the subject of the discussion.
Not some glorious victory for freedom of the press.
**THE MONEY.**
Who pays?
Why so much?
Why are the lawyers receiving most of it?
Why should the taxpayers bear the financial consequences of decisions made by public officials?
As it happens, I have already taken the question of municipal insurance expenditures to court.
And the Decker settlement provides additional material for that investigation.
## IX. A County's litigation Attorney's Duty Is to the County — Not to the Continuation of Litigation
Frank Miller's thirty years representing Delaware County are important for another reason.
An attorney representing a municipality owes professional duties to the governmental client.
The client is not the attorney's personal network of county officials.
Nor is the purpose of municipal representation to preserve questionable contracting arrangements from scrutiny.
The attorney's responsibility is to represent the governmental entity in accordance with law.
That includes confronting legal problems that may embarrass individual officials.
The fact that a conflict-of-interest defense might expose longstanding county practices is not a reason to avoid it.
It is a reason to investigate it.
The public deserves an accounting of why the County's attorneys failed to make the Shepard contractual conflict central to the defense.
It also deserves an accounting of how much the litigation cost before the settlement.
And it deserves to know whether the County's decision to settle was influenced by interests other than minimizing lawful public expenditures.
I have publicly accused Miller of professional incompetence and misconduct in other proceedings.
His handling of the Decker litigation adds a substantial new subject to that criticism.
**Thirty years of representing the County make the failure to confront the Shepard conflict particularly significant.**
The taxpayers are entitled to ask whether this was an oversight, a conscious litigation decision, or part of a broader pattern of protecting municipal contracting relationships at public expense.
The documents, invoices, and communications concerning the defense and settlement deserve examination.
## X. OH, WHAT A WAYNE!!! 🐰🐰💰
Let us summarize the remarkable result.
A newspaper owned by the brother of a longtime county official receives municipal business.
The County discontinues its official designation.
The newspaper sues, presenting the dispute as a First Amendment controversy.
The County's attorneys fail to squarely confront the family-connected contractual arrangement.
The litigation continues for nearly three years.
An investigative journalist identifies the omitted conflict and publicly considers intervening on the County's side.
One week later, the County approves a $600,000 settlement.
Only $27,937.93 is allocated to compensatory damages.
The remaining $572,062.07 is allocated to attorney's fees and litigation costs.
The County's own defense expenses are additional.
And the County **EXPECTS** its insurer to pay those defense expenses and the substantial majority of the settlement.
All this in a rural county whose property owners must pay taxes under the ultimate threat of foreclosure.
Meanwhile, I already have a taxpayer-waste lawsuit pending against NYMIR and the attorneys involved in another questionable municipal insurance transaction.
So perhaps the story does not end with the Board of Supervisors' approval.
Perhaps the next chapter concerns the actual insurance payments, the legality of the underlying obligations, and the responsibility of those who authorized the expenditures.
Perhaps the taxpayers will finally learn how much this family-connected litigation has cost them.
And perhaps someone will finally answer the question I asked Frank Miller on November 3:
**WHY DIDN'T YOU RAISE THE CONFLICT IMMEDIATELY?**
After thirty years representing Delaware County, Mr. Miller should have had ample opportunity to become acquainted with its officials and their family relationships.
The taxpayers, meanwhile, have had ample opportunity to become acquainted with the tax collector.
One group receives municipal contracts, litigation settlements, and attorney's fees.
The other receives tax bills enforceable against their homes.
**WHAT A WAYNE!!!**
🐰🐰💰
*To be continued — with the insurance records.*
---
*Tatiana Neroni, Juris Doctor — investigative journalist, legal scholar, and plaintiff in Neroni v. New York Municipal Insurance Reciprocal et al., Nassau County Supreme Court, Index No. 621856/2026.*
Bear with me for this article's lousy fotmatting. I am not feeling well and am voice-typing. Will format as soon as I get better. Could not let these bast... oh, oopsie - bunnies, of course - get away with their continuous robbery of local taxpayers.
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