49°
VALHALLA, N.Y. – The Valhalla School District avoided a drawn out appeals process and agreed to refund $1.1 million to the town of Greenburgh in a settlement for illegal payments made by the town to the school district.
Edgemont lawyer Robert Bernstein, who negotiated the settlement along with attorney Herb Rosenberg, said that the settlement payment will not hurt the education of children in the Valhalla School District.
“If the district were to lose the appeal, the penalties would have been far worse,” Bernstein said. “This settlement allows the district to carry on with their goals.”
Laverne Clark, president of the Valhalla Board of Education, referred a request for comment to district Superintendent Brenda Myers. Messages left with Myers were not returned Tuesday.
In November 2011, New York State Supreme Court ruled that the school district would be required to pay Greenburgh $1.8 million to refund the town for payments made to the district that were deemed illegal. In a complicated agreement in 2004, the Town of Greenburgh agreed to pay the Valhalla School District $650,000 annually for 10 years for allowing a homeless shelter within its borders.
In February, the Valhalla Board of Education voted to appeal the ruling, but ultimately settled on the reduced payment. The settlement was unanimously approved Friday at a special board of education meeting and ratified Tuesday morning by the Greenburgh Town Board.
The $1.1 million will be paid to Greenburgh over the course of a nine-year period, Bernstein said. The majority of the settlement will be paid by September 2013, with $400,000 to be paid by this September and another $150,000 paid by next year.
Greenburgh Town Supervisor Paul Feiner said that the school district should be able to afford the settlement.
"I think it's a fair agreement," Feiner said Tuesday. "I feel the goal is not to kill the school district."
Comments (6)
Another unfair aspect of this fiasco is that :
A: the Valhalla School Committee that controlled the $1.8 million was a committe of the town of Greenburgh. So technically the funds never left control of the town.
B. Repayment of the $1.1 million will $888,000 will be paid by taxpayers who live in Mt Pleasant and North Castle who had no control of the funds. only $220,000 will be repaid by the taxpayers of Greenburgh and only a portion of that by residents of Mayfair Knollwood who had absolute control of the funds through the make up of the "Valhalla School Committee"
C. Somehow no one is asking the people who directly benefitted to pay back the stolen funds. Where are the records of who participated in these boondogles? We know Mike Smith had his daughter's private school expense paid, maybe we can start by him writing the first check.
go to www.valhallavoice.com and type westhelp in the search box
All excellent points. I guess the public and the authorities aren’t interested in felony theft, unless someone is caught breaking and entering or unless it’s a sting operation that includes a perp walk for the cops and the prosecutors.
What troubles me is that some of those responsible for this debacle are now in government at the county level. If the good people of the Valhalla UFSD want to elect these people to local office, far be it from me to question it. But now they are in a position to cause direct financial damage to our collective pockets.
• Edwin McCormack, who engineered this fiasco, is in the Astorino administration. As McCormack isn't an elected official, voters should hold Astorino and Feiner accountable for giving him authority that resulted in so much fiscal damage.
• Mike Smith—how he was elected to countywide office by those he has now screwed financially—is incomprehensible to me.
No strong editorials from the media condemning these activities and people. Wake up journalists.
I cannot defend Town Supervisor Paul Feiner's illegal giveaway of millions of dollars in Town revenues to the Valhalla school district in order to buy himself political support from Mayfair Knollwood any more than I could defend Mr. Feiner's having placed an eight-foot high barbed wire fence around the WestHELP facility on the campus of WCC in order to keep the homeless unwed mostly African American mothers and their pre-K children from wandering a mile through the woods to the Mayfair Knollwood neighborhood which so vehemently opposed their mere presence for two decades.
What I can do, however, is defend (i) my having intervened, at my own personal expense, with Herb Rosenberg, to prevent collusion between Mr. Feiner and the school district which (after the state comptroller said it was illegal) inexplicably sued for breach of contract to enforce Mr. Feiner's illegal gift (and together with the Town attorney) left out the most important part of the grant, which was the Town's right to get back money wrongfully disbursed, and (ii) my having negotiated, with Mr. Rosenberg, a settlement with the school district which, if the $1.8 million judgment we obtained for the taxpayers of Greenburgh were affirmed on appeal and enforced, would have penalized the children of a school district who would have been made victims by the actions of politicians like Mr. Feiner who should never have engaged in such illegal conduct at our expense in the first place.
Every taxpayer in Greenburgh should know that Mr. Feiner's actions cost us much more than the $700,000 (plus much more in interest) that we agreed not to collect as part of the settlement. And anyone who wants to know just how morally reprehensible Mr. Feiner's conduct was in this matter should visit the former WestHELP facility, whose 108 apartments have been purposely kept vacant since October 1, 2011 by Mr. Feiner's refusal to allow them to be leased to low and moderate income tenants as the Town's lease with the county -- and county law -- both require, costing the Town hundreds of thousands of dollars more in lost revenue, and take a look at that 20-year old rusted barbed wire fence that surrounds the facility. It is a symbol of the ugly racism that underlies this entire shameful debacle.
Bob, you don't have to defend your actions, at least not to me. Thank you to you and Herb for working on this at your own expense. Your selfless work is truly a benefit to the entire town.
While I empathize with the sentiment of minimizing the impact to Valhalla UFD's children, the fact is all constituents, whether minor or adult, bear the bad decisions of their elected leaders. We see it every night on the news when children are, unfortunately, forced to live with bad the decisions that their parents make.
It's frustrating to read Feiner say that this settlement is fair when you, me and the rest of Greenburgh, ex Mayfair-Knollwood, paid a portion of the $700,000 to the Valhalla School District and received no benefit whatsover. Where is the fairness in that? Voters really need to question who Mr. Feiner purports to represent, and in whose best interest is he working.
With a settlement like this, the goal is obviously to destroy the taxpayers of Greenburgh. Let’s do the math. $1.8 million illegally went out the door to Valhalla over a three-year period; only $1.1 million is coming back over nine years. That is an absolute loss of $700,000 but the loss in real dollars is greater when you calculate that less money is coming in over a longer time period, and no interest will be earned. Greenburgh has essentially made a loan to the Valhalla School District and is willing to accept repayment of 40% of the principal. A bank that made loans on these terms wouldn’t be in business for long.
As we are not a bank, how does that $700,000 hole get accounted for? It doesn’t. It is $700,000 less to spend on essential services. Imagine if our beleaguered library had $700,000. That would have been a suitable town wide purpose, which the state comptroller said would have been a fair way to use these proceeds. Instead
Feiner gave away $700,000 of the WestHelp proceeds to keep the politically active voters of the Mayfair-Knollwood area as supporters of his future re-election campaigns/runs for higher office. It was an ill-conceived idea and poor leadership, plain and simple. I would argue that it is also corrupt and should be investigated by the attorney general.