OSSINING — A town councilman has taken to social media to expose what he calls government fraud and denounce the inaction of the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office in the matter.
Councilman Peter Tripodi has posted pictures and documents on his open Facebook page each day since Monday, showing a town Highway Department truck at a Brookfield, Conn., scrap metal yard selling off such scrap materials.
Highway Department employees, Tripodi said, collected $5,000 from 2004 to 2010 for the scrap metal and pocketed the money rather than put it back into the town’s general fund.
“Any department that gets any revenue must submit it to the finance department,” Tripodi said. “I don’t know why we are holding the Highway Department to another standard from other departments.”
The matter was referred to the District Attorney’s Office in 2010. Tripodi said it took a year — and him calling the office monthly — before the office found “insufficient evidence to warrant the filing of criminal charges.”
“I believe the D.A. had more than sufficient evidence for criminal charges, and I will wait no more and expose her office for the sham that it is,” Tripodi said.
“The evidence is overwhelming, and the public should know when their tax dollars are being abused. Furthermore, the public should know when the D.A. chooses to ignore clear evidence of the same. I will prove, through my Facebook posts, how wrong the D.A. was in their laughable determination to sit and do nothing,” Tripodi said.
District Attorney Janet DiFiore’s spokesman, Lucian Chalfen, said the matter was referred to the district attorney by the town attorney at the behest of then-Supervisor Catherine Borgia.
When they investigated, he said, they found that the highway superintendent had given the green light to the sale of the scrap metal.
The investigation began in June 2010, and the district attorney responded in May 2011, he said.
“Evidently we had found that this had been an authorized procedure, which, as the result of opening up the investigation, had stopped,” Chalfen said. “We found no criminal conduct in that activity.”
Highway Department employees, Tripodi said, collected $5,000 from 2004 to 2010 for the scrap metal and pocketed the money rather than put it back into the town’s general fund.
“Any department that gets any revenue must submit it to the finance department,” Tripodi said. “I don’t know why we are holding the Highway Department to another standard from other departments.”
The matter was referred to the District Attorney’s Office in 2010. Tripodi said it took a year — and him calling the office monthly — before the office found “insufficient evidence to warrant the filing of criminal charges.”
“I believe the D.A. had more than sufficient evidence for criminal charges, and I will wait no more and expose her office for the sham that it is,” Tripodi said.
“The evidence is overwhelming, and the public should know when their tax dollars are being abused. Furthermore, the public should know when the D.A. chooses to ignore clear evidence of the same. I will prove, through my Facebook posts, how wrong the D.A. was in their laughable determination to sit and do nothing,” Tripodi said.
District Attorney Janet DiFiore’s spokesman, Lucian Chalfen, said the matter was referred to the district attorney by the town attorney at the behest of then-Supervisor Catherine Borgia.
When they investigated, he said, they found that the highway superintendent had given the green light to the sale of the scrap metal.
The investigation began in June 2010, and the district attorney responded in May 2011, he said.
“Evidently we had found that this had been an authorized procedure, which, as the result of opening up the investigation, had stopped,” Chalfen said. “We found no criminal conduct in that activity.”
Tripodi said that when the practice was revealed in 2010, the Highway Department reimbursed the town $700.
He said department officials said the money raised from the scrap metal sale had been put into a petty cash fund for the department to buy birthday cakes and other such items for employees.
“Everyone involved was an elected Democrat,” said Tripodi, a Republican, referring to DiFiore, O’Connor and Borgia. “Was this the reason no criminal charges were filed?”
The scrap metal controversy arose in an internal audit conducted on the Highway Department last year. Also last year, the Town Board pitched a referendum to change the highway superintendent position from an elected to an appointed one. Voters soundly rejected the proposition in the November election.
Current Ossining Supervisor Susanne Donnelly also would not comment on Tripodi’s Facebook campaign. She did say that at a February board meeting, members had asked O’Connor to return March 19 with a detailed report on how those funds had been spent and to give his recommendations on dealing with scrap metal in the future.
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