To the Editor:
In an Aug. 8, 2023, letter to the editor (”Claw back pay from Solvay officials who mismanaged electric fund”), Connie Brown made the case that those responsible for the village of Solvay mismanaged funds should be held accountable. From the board members who saw the first signs of this activity, we couldn’t agree more and we thank you for the concern.
The question is: Who effected the illegal transfers of funds from the electric department to the general fund? The method is insidious. The state’s report showed that 30% of bills randomly sampled from 2020-2022 that were paid by the electric department were inappropriate. This means that those inappropriate bills that were paid out of the electric fund should have been charged and paid out of the General Fund. This is how the electric fund has been depleted. There are no board-approved budget modifications, only the quiet submission of general fund bills to the electric department for payment. It would be the same as putting your own bills in your neighbor’s mailbox then hoping they would not notice and just make payment.
If you were to add up all of the approved budget modifications for the general fund, even over a 10-year period, they would only amount to a fraction of the $9 million that the state has reported as being moved improperly. None of those budget modifications included money that came illegally from the electric fund. Modifications were within the general fund only to move money from a line item with excess balance to a depleted line item in need of replenishment. The first hint that something else was affecting our finances occurred when the checks written by the mayor bounced, totaling $1.6 million. Coupled with this were additional complaints from the electric department superintendent about the improper bill submissions and a treasurer about lack of funds (both are no longer working for the village for obvious reasons). At that point, we took away the mayor’s…
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