A Freedom of Information Law request for Councilwoman Giglio’s notes from her New York City meeting with the Triple Five group indicates that the councilwoman actually took almost no notes during that meeting.
A yellow legal pad provided by the town in response to the FOIL request contained notes made almost exclusively before the March 12 meeting.
The pad contained 13 pages of handwritten notes in black ink that Giglio said were made before the NYC meeting. Three of those 13 pages contained questions Giglio wrote before the Feb. 27 opening session of the Calverton Aviation and Technology qualified and eligible hearing. The remaining 10 pages were notes made mostly during the Feb. 27 hearing.
Riverhead Town Attorney Robert Kozakiewicz said Giglio had informed him that the notes in black ink were made on or prior to Feb. 27 and that notations she made in blue ink on the same pages were made during the March 12 meeting in NYC.
In addition to the bound pages of the yellow legal pad, the town produced four loose pieces of paper the councilwoman said she’d taken from Deputy Supervisor Tim Hubbard during the Feb. 27 meeting when she ran out of paper in the yellow pad. The loose pages also contained notes handwritten in black ink with a few notations in blue ink.
Next to a question written in black ink that read, “What large scale industrial projects have you built? Successes?” are notations in blue ink that read “Sunset Park 200K sf. Las Vegas 15 yrs ago” and an illegible word followed by “300K sf.”
At the top of one of the loose white pages, Giglio had written in blue ink a list that reads:
“Scimax —
Helidex —
Amer
Q Tech — how many sf now expanding
Launcher — Max Haut [sic] livestream”
There were additional notes written in black ink underneath that list, relating to Launcher and Maglev, two companies who appeared at the March 19 session of the Q&E hearing to say they wanted to locate within the CAT development.
The town attorney produced the note pad and loose pages on April 13, in response to a FOIL request submitted by RiverheadLOCAL April 5. Giglio provided the yellow legal pad and the four loose pages of notes in response to the FOIL request, he said, with the explanation about the different colored inks indicating the different dates the notes were made. Giglio confirmed this on Tuesday. Hubbard also confirmed Tuesday that he’d given Giglio some paper during the Feb. 27 hearing.
At the April 5 work session, Giglio offered to fill the board in on her March 12 meeting. The councilwoman had come under fire for taking that meeting in NYC on her own, without consulting the other board members or the town’s special counsel. (See prior story.)
“I know the board was curious about the questions when I went into the city to meet with them. Would you like me to go over all those questions and answers now?” she asked at the conclusion of the business on that day’s published agenda.
Giglio then went through notes on a yellow legal pad, page by page, stating that she asked the Triple Five representatives at the March 12 meeting about each of the points she read from the pad.
Throughout the work session debriefing, Giglio appeared to read questions that were written on the pad and often appeared to provide many of the applicant’s responses from memory. See work session video here.
There were no notes relating to the offer made by Triple Five chairman Nader Ghermezian at the March 19 hearing to fund $2.5 million worth of recreation facility improvements at the town’s Calverton park, a subject Giglio said she discussed with Ghermezian. Upon questioning by Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith at the April 5 work session, Giglio appeared to relay details of that conversation from memory.
Deputy Town Attorney Daniel McCormick used a yellow high-lighter pen to indicate the notes made in blue ink on photocopied pages of the original documents provided by the town attorney’s office to RiverheadLOCAL.
RiverheadLOCAL’s April 5 FOIL request also sought production of all emails between Giglio and any representative of Triple Five between Feb. 27 and the date of the request.
Kozakiewicz said there are no emails to produce. He said he asked the town board coordinator, who works as an assistant to the four council members, to do the search.
RiverheadLOCAL subsequently requested the town to have its IT department search the town’s mail server. It also requested that the councilwoman be asked to produce any email sent to or received from Triple Five representatives on Giglio’s private business account, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Law if used for public business. On March 13, Giglio sent RiverheadLOCAL an email about the Luminati/Triple Five deal using a Bennett Enterprises email account. She also sent RiverheadLOCAL an email about Luminati from the same private email account last year.
Bennett Enterprises is a company Giglio has owned since 1997, her resume says. Its business is “land use, material sales,” according to Giglio’d most recent financial disclosure and conflict statement dated March 28, 2018.
Riverhead Councilwoman Jodi Giglio Notes FOIL #382-2018 by East End Local Media Corp. on Scribd
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