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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
Legislators
undermine
Bennett
   Very well. Last month Schenectady’s new public safety commissioner, Wayne Bennett, announced that he was going to assume control of discipline in the Schenectady Police Department and dispense with outside arbitrators, based on a little-noticed Court of Appeals decision from the previous year.
   He said arbitrators’ decisions had been “very, very inconsistent” and sometimes “outrageous.” It was clearly a move to assert authority over a department that has been tarnished by scandal over the years, as first one officer and then another was convicted of criminal conduct.
   And it was heartily endorsed by Mayor Brian Stratton, who said it would help instill integrity in the department.
   No more reliance on outsiders assigned by the Public Employment Relations Board. The boss would be the boss.
   That was on June 4. Seventeen days later a bill came to the floor of the state Assembly negating the Court of Appeals decision that had made Bennett’s move possible and mandating that arbitration be employed in all cases of police discipline, regardless of what local law might require, thereby undermining the efforts of Bennett and Stratton as well as other mayors and public safety commissioners across the state.
   The bill was almost certainly written by police unions and simply handed to the Legislature.
   How do you suppose the two Assembly members who represented the city of Schenectady at the time, Paul Tonko and Jim Tedisco, voted on that bill? Well, from the way I have set up the question, you won’t be surprised to learn they voted in favor of it. In other words, they voted to cancel Commissioner Bennett’s authority to do what he said he needed to do in order to restore integrity to the Police Department.
   Second question: Do you suppose either Tonko or Tedisco consulted with the mayor or with the commissioner before casting that fateful vote.
   Answer: No, they did not.
   The bill passed, 146 to 4, with the four dissenting votes coming from other parts of the state, and if there was anything amazing about this it was only that there were as many four Assembly members willing to defy the police unions.
   In the Senate, a month earlier, the vote had been unanimous, 61-0, and included the vote of Schenectady’s man, Sen. Hugh Farley.
   (“Don’t underestimate the power of the police lobby,” Stratton told me.)
   Naturally I asked these public servants why they voted as they did.
   Then-Assemblyman Tonko (he has since taken a state authority job) said he believed “the negotiated outcomes” — meaning arbitrators’ decisions — “have not compromised the delivery of public services,” and since other public employees have access to arbitration, “providing uniformity was important.”
   In other words, gobbledygook.
   His counterpart, Jim Tedisco, did not respond to my phone calls or e-mails, and I can’t say I blame him, since I’m sure he knew where I was headed with this.
   Sen. Farley noted that in the Senate the bill passed on a so-called fast roll call, meaning unanimous passage with no debate, just a rubber-stamp process for something already approved by the leadership.
   “I didn’t give it a great deal of thought,” he admitted. “There wasn’t a whisper of controversy,” which didn’t surprise me in the least.
   What he would not say and what no legislator will ever say is the simple truth, which is that the police unions and other public employee unions have tremendous influence in Albany because of the money they contribute and their ability to mobilize the vote, and it’s very dangerous to go against them just as it’s very dangerous to go against your own leadership. At the next election you’re liable to find yourself with a well-funded opponent with a telephone-tree of activists getting out the vote against you.
   All these unions basically have the Legislature in their pocket. And please note it makes no difference if the legislators are Republicans or Democrats. Farley and Tedisco are Republicans, Tonko is a Democrat. The Senate is Republican-controlled, the Assembly is Democratic-controlled. They all vote the same.
   As for the people of Schenectady, the people who have long endured a police department shamed by misconduct, a police department widely believed to be out of control, too bad for them.
   In the first place they probably won’t notice a vote on some obscure bill “to amend the civil service law, in relation to the negotiability of discipline affecting public employees,” as it was offi - cially described, and in the second place, the people of Schenectady don’t have the organized clout of the police unions. So too bad for them.
   Commissioner Bennett and Mayor Stratton will just have to pull their horns back and let the rank-and-file cops continue to make monkeys out of them, or at least they’ll have to if Gov. Spitzer signs the bill into law.
   We’ll wait and see on that one. It sometimes seems the legislators pass these outrageous bills in the confidence that the governor, of whichever party, will veto them. Gov. Pataki vetoed a bunch of them last year, and Gov. Spitzer has already vetoed some this year.
   I’ll be watching to see what Gov. Spitzer does with this one.
   Sen. Farley actually said, “My only advice is if Mayor Stratton and Commissioner Bennett are concerned they ought to ask for it to be vetoed,” which I thought was interesting, coming from him.
   The bill number, by the way, is S-5295 and A-8139 if you want to track it yourself.

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No more reliance on outsiders assigned by the Public Employment Relations Board. The boss would be the boss.

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No more reliance on outsiders assigned by the Public Employment Relations Board. The boss would be the boss.

Would that be PERB....or.....PERP...??????

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8 charged with patronizing prostitutes  
Friday, July 13, 2007

SCHENECTADY - City and state police charged eight men Friday with misdemeanor patronizing a prostitute.
  
The arrests were the result of a initiative that targeted customers, city police said. The men range in age from 29 to 66 and live all over the Capital Region.

City police said it would publish the names, addresses and photographs of the men on its Web site, http://www.schenectadypd.com, as a means of discouraging "others who may consider patronizing a prostitute in Schenectady."