Supervisors very generous with raises to sheriff, themselves
Lots of memories about Post-Star building on Lawrence & Cooper
By Ken Tingley
This past summer, Warren County supervisors stood up to the sheriff. He was demanding a raise of $18,875. Keep in mind Sheriff Jim LaFarr was making over $120,000 at a time. That’s a pretty good salary in these parts.
What was surprising was the supervisors negotiated raises for most of the non-union leadership in law enforcement and the county jail. It raised their salaries higher than LaFarr. It almost seemed like they were sending LaFarr a message.
This past Friday, the supervisors approved a raise in next year’s budget that gives LaFarr a 15 percent raise.
Coincidentally, that 15 percent raise adds more than $18,000 to LaFarr’s salary. So, he got his raise after all.
Here’s one thing I learned as an manager of a newspaper. If everyone is given the same percentage raise, the people earning the most will get the largest raises. The gap in their paychecks will continue to widen.
In this case, the supervisors agreed to 2.85 percent raise to union employees.
An employee earning $40,000 a year gets a raise of $1,140 dollars or about $22 a week. That’s what I call pizza money. Your raise buys you one more pizza a week.
In LaFarr’s case, he earns $120,000 a year. His 15 percent raise increases his salary about $18,000 a year or $350 a week. I call that filet mignon money. You can eat really well with that type of raise.
Two Glens Falls supervisors - Jack Diamond and Claudia Braymer - proposed reducing LaFarr’s raise to 2.85 percent. That raise for LaFarr would still be three times what a $40,000 employee gets ($3,420) and amount to $65 a week. It’s not filet mignon, but it is definitely steak.
Most people would be pretty happy with a $65 a week raise.
There was little support for the measure among the other supervisors, despite the fact that LaFarr has made a laughingstock of their nepotism policy - he hired his son to work for him - and has been secretive about many criminal cases.
The supervisors also gave themselves a 30 percent raise.
There was more discussion over this raise and a call to lower it to 2.85 percent as well.
The supervisors defeated the proposal to lower the raise to 2.85 percent by a 9-8 vote.
What was not reported was who were the nine who voted for LaFarr’s raise.
In another time, the newspaper used to include a vote box which told how each person voted. It held them accountable to voters. It might have had an effect in yesterday’s voting. A public meeting has been scheduled to discuss the budget further on Nov. 17 and the newspaper would weigh in on whether this was sound spending of taxpayer dollars.
Reporter responds
After writing about my memories at The Post-Star building on Lawrence and Cooper Streets earlier this week, I heard from former news reporter Nick Reisman. You probably have seen Nick on Spectrum news over the years covering Albany politics and government. He now works for Politico.
Nick related a late-night story from his days at The Post-Star. He was in the newsroom waiting for a couple of the sports folks to finish so they could grab a beer when a fire was reported in Queensbury. They all decided to forgo the plan for a beer and go cover the fire.
Nick got some bare bones information about a warehouse burning where no one was hurt and one of the sports folks got a photo.
“But it was easily one of the more fun nights I had working at the newspaper. What's sad is between remote work, the depleted resources and the reduced ambition, something like that won't be replicated for people just getting started in the business,” Nick said in an email. “You learn a lot in a newsroom -- how to talk to cops, how to collaborate with other reporters and editors. And I definitely learned a lot at Lawrence and Cooper Streets.”
We all did.
Another Post-Star story
Shortly after I arrived at the newspaper, we replaced an antiquated computer system called - the One System. To celebrate the event, an auction was held for the honor by one employee to take a sledge hammer to one of the terminals on the back loading dock.
Greg Brownell, the assistant sports editor at the time, won the auction and laid waste to the poor terminal to the cheers of his fellow employees.
We hated that computer system.
Greg just retired this past year. I’m glad he didn’t have to move to a new building.
People I missed
Off the top of my head I mentioned a few of the people who shaped The Post-Star over the years.
In retrospect, I missed a couple of the people who were their for decades. One was Michelle Georgianni, the long-time circulation representative who started work there as a teenager and left as the circulation manager after 42 years.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention our long-time obituary clerks Kathy Hamell and Barb Green. They were our true ambassadors to the community. Both were there over 40 years.
Well, I just spent months trying to explain our system of government to the people of Queensbury and I guess I did a terrible job, so I deserved to lose.
On the Warren County Board of Supervisors outside of committee there is not a 9-8 vote. We have a system of weighted voting that in theory provides for Constitutionally guaranteed one person-one vote representation. I don’t believe the Supervisor system we have does that but let me try to explain how it supposedly works.
In Warren County we have 20 supervisors on the BOS. 11 of them are town supervisors, top executive in their town for which they get paid some amount of money, but they also get a second job as county supervisor.
The other 9 are the 5 Glens Falls supervisors elected by Ward, and the 4 Queensbury county supervisors elected at-large, or town wide. These 9 are the only supervisors directly elected to county positions and they only get 1 paycheck - from the county.
Because Queensbury holds 44.5% of county population, GF has 22.5%, and the other 10 towns together account for 33% of population each supervisors is assigned a weighted vote.
Imagine it like a soccer game where each supervisor gets one free kick at the goal. But the value of each goal is different depending on which town the player represents. The total number of points possible is 1000, so to win the “team” needs to score 501 points. A player from Queensbury gets 89 points per kick, GF gets 45, and on down to Hague that gets 10.
So a “close” game can be 13 players on one side vs 7 players from the other side: 5 Qby + 1 GF + Stony Creek would beat the other 13 together.
The problem is that in committee there is no weighted vote and the committees design the goal posts. It’s a convoluted system that very few people really understand, and in my opinion if people do not understand their system of government it is a bad system that needs to be changed.
The other kind of weird things is that we elect supervisors to run their towns. In some of the small towns the supervisor position may be a a part time job, and I have no idea what the pay rate is, but in Queensbury the supervisor is a full time job, I doubt any reasonable person would disagree. So why are does our form of government make a person with a full time job in government work a second job, admittedly a part time job, as a county supervisor?
Can anyone imagine that working in some other office? Would we expect the Governor to work a second job?
Anybody who has watched the performance of the Warren County Supervisors in the past 2 years should be disgusted with the way they have been spending tax dollars (including bed tax which some of them say is out of town people paying so not the same). And the raises are an absolute joke but so are the many incumbent and corrupt supervisors. It's time to go to a County Legislature model so the little fiefdoms of the County no longer are the tail wagging the dog. Oh well, until the voters wake up and vote the losers out, it will be deja vu all over again.