Yorktown Town Board Abused the Public Trust Over Meeting Minutes
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
The Yorktown Town Board meeting on Dec. 13, 2022, began with a political statement, which was made at taxpayer expense.
Councilman Lachterman claimed that the Town Board’s written meeting minutes were not available to the public. In actuality, these minutes were available in four different locations. Additionally, they were no longer even considered to be the official minutes.
Last February, New York State law changed, which made video recordings the official minutes of Town Board meetings. This made the need for written minutes obsolete. But our town clerk continued to provide written minutes for the benefit of our residents.
The councilman wasn’t aware that the written minutes are in four locations. Nor was he aware that the video recording of the meeting was the official record of the meeting. And for nearly two years did he even notice that the written minutes weren’t being stored where he had expected them to be.
Councilman Lachterman hadn’t looked at the minutes for nearly two years!
And why, after all this time, did this become a Town Board issue?
Why did our Town Board spend 30 minutes at a recent Town Board meeting on this subject?
Well, the reason became crystal clear on Tuesday, Dec. 27 during the holiday break, when a political survey was distributed to Yorktown residents asking (quite misleadingly) if they knew that the minutes of Town Board meetings were deliberately being withheld from the public.
The entire Yorktown Town Board created a nonsensical reason to attack our town clerk. Unfortunately, it was for their own political purposes.
This is outrageous!
It’s more than outrageous, it’s an abuse of our public trust!
Phil Corrao
Yorktown
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