Lawrence Village Officials Fight Over Payments

Three members of the Village of Lawrence Board of Trustees voted on Thursday to have its attorney draft a letter to the attorney general on items that were moved forward on by the administration without board consent, prompting a defensive and vexed reaction from the mayor.

The heated discussion turned attention to payments that were made to temporary employees of the village that the trustees did not ratify, but were signed off by Mayor Martin Oliner. The motion on the letter was introduced by Trustee Joel Mael and approved by Mael and Trustees Michael Fragin and Ed Klar.

“You’ve gone beyond the pale of decency,” Oliner told Mael, and said the action borders on slander. “No one has been inappropriately paid here. I write checks for people who need to get paid. To give this impression that [Village Administrator David] Smollet or Oliner did something inappropriate is way off mark.”

The at odds stems from a New York State Comptroller’s on the village from earlier this year that said the board “did not properly oversee certain village financial activities.” This included payments to vendors. Since then, Mael, Fragin and Klar have frequently raised issues about financial transactions by the village and claimed they did not receive enough information about them to let them move forward.

“There were objections and they were ignored,” Fragin said. “I have personal liability here, potentially. I shouldn’t have to be in a situation where I can be penalized. This is not a new issue. Why should the board be a rubber stamp?”
But Oliner said this instance had nothing to do with the comptroller’s report, which he said raised concerns “over payments when there is no benefit to the village.”

During the meeting, the mayor raised the case of one worker, named Mike, who worked for the village for five weeks.

“The man called me, in tears, saying he needed the money, so I signed the check,” he said at the meeting. “If any payments were inappropriate, I will pay them back to the village. Those people did the work. I chose to pay them.”

Mael suggested the mayor is missing the point.

“I didn’t find anything to be illegal or wrong, I just don’t have the information,” he told Patch in a phone interview after the meeting. “The fact that this person was hired or paid, and threatened to sue or cried on the phone, we all feel bad about it, but that is not the law.”

He said that people working for the village need to be approved by the board before their employment.

Mayor Oliner said he and members of the board have “a fundamental disagreement on the facts.”

“‘We didn’t have enough information’ is not credible when someone is in front of you,” he told Patch.

Trustee Fragin said the entire exchange shouldn’t have happened.

“I think that the mayor and deputy mayor let their personal feelings towards each other get in the way of good government,” he said. “The citizens of Lawrence should expect better and indeed deserve better. At the same time, they also need to feel confident that their elected officials are safeguarding every dollar of their tax money.”