Board members apologize to late town justice’s family after scheduling snafu

Town board members this morning apologized to the family of the late Town Justice Allen Smith.

Smith served as a justice for 20 years before his sudden passing in July. He had also served as town supervisor from 1976 to 1979.

Smith’s family was invited to the town board meeting on Tuesday for a presentation of a grave marker by the board and town historian Georgette Case.

The grave marker is embossed with the adopted town seal on and the word “supervisor” along the bottom.

“The markers were purchased some time ago with community donations,” Case said.

An aide to Supervisor Yvette Aguiar, who as supervisor sets the town board’s meeting agendas, emailed Smith’s family on Dec. 15 to invite them to the Jan. 5\meeting. The email said, “As we discussed, Supervisor Aguiar would like to invite the family of Justice Smith to attend a special meeting to be held during the January 5, 2021 Town Board meeting at 2:00 pm.”

Smith’s domestic partner Charlene Mascia, his son, Jacob, daughter-in-law Jeanne and grandchildren Emma and Liam, along with the town historian, arrived at town hall before 2 p.m. Due to COVID restrictions limiting the number of people in the town board meeting room, they were asked to wait outside until called to come in for the ceremony.

They waited and waited — for an hour and a half — but no one ever came out to invite them inside.

When they decided they couldn’t wait any longer, Case presented the family with the grave marker and an American flag. They posed for a group photo in the hallway and left.

The order of Tuesday afternoon’s meeting, according to the agenda published by the supervisor’s office, had the consideration of four resolutions prior to three ceremonial items, including the presentation to the Smith family.

Typically, presentations take place before the consideration of board resolutions. The board will often take a resolution “out of order” — moving it up to the beginning of the meeting if necessary to accompany a resolution.

The four resolutions to be taken up at the beginning of Tuesday’s meeting did relate to three of the ceremonial items. One was a resolution formally accepting Jodi Giglio’s resignation from the town board. She was to be sworn in as an assembly member during the town board meeting. Another was a resolution appointing new police officers, four of whom were to be sworn in at the meeting. The other two related to the appointment of a new town board member to fill the Giglio vacancy. The person appointed was to be sworn into office at the meeting as well, according to the agenda.

That’s where the meeting went off the rails. The public is always provided with an opportunity to comment on resolutions before the board takes them up for a vote. Each person is allowed five minutes for comments. There were more than a dozen people — attending via Zoom — seeking to comment on one or more of the first four resolutions. All but two of the people commenting were speaking in support of the resolution to appoint Marylin Winter to the town board. The other two wanted to speak about Giglio’s resignation.

About 20 minutes into the meeting, while comments were being heard, Giglio asked the supervisor to call the resolution accepting her resignation and have her swearing-in, because she had a judge in the audience waiting to administer the oath and he had to get back to his duties, Giglio said. The supervisor complied, then the comments resumed.

The Smith family continued to wait.

“Finally at 3:30 we had had enough,” Mascia wrote in a post to RiverheadLOCAL’s “Remembering Riverhead” Facebook group.

“Allen’s grandchildren were getting antsy, as you can well imagine, and we adults were wondering what was happening,” she wrote. She, Jacob and Jeanne had all taken off from work to attend the meeting, Mascia wrote.

“Feeling quite disrespected, we turned to leave when the wonderful Georgette Case, town historian, greeted us in the hallway with the grave marker, Mascia wrote. “We took our own photos and exchanged warm words about Allen and how he admired and appreciated Ms. Case. Then we left, feeling less than honored by the Riverhead Town Board.”

Mascia’s post elicited more than 100 responses from residents who uniformly panned the town board for the Tuesday’s turn of events.

The town supervisor joined the discussion.

“I created an agenda and Judge Smith was supposed to be honored in a timely fashion,” Aguiar wrote. “However, someone with a political agenda decided to filibuster with 18 calls on her behalf which was selfish and insensitive with intentions to disrupt our meeting and disregarded taking into account the published ceremony that was planned to honor a person who dedicated his life to Riverhead,” Aguiar wrote.

She did not say who the “someone with a political agenda” was — whether she was referring to Councilwoman Catherine Kent, who introduced the resolution, or Kent’s nominee, Winter.

The supervisor did not directly respond to a question about that in an email.

“Someone decided to not take into account the sensitivity of the events and caused a substantial delay,” she wrote in an email this afternoon. She said she discussed logistics with board members on Monday. “I set the agenda on what I knew and was related to me. Should I have been informed, I would have changed the flow of the agenda,” she wrote.

“I have apologized to the Smith family both publicly and privately, sent a letter of apology today and offered them the opportunity to set a special town board meeting to honor Justice Smith’s dedication to Riverhead town. We wait the Smith family’s decision on this offer,” she wrote.