We’re gonna take Trump’s advice on this one

It’s time to pull the curtain back. 

The public has a right to know how its government works (or doesn’t), how and why the people they elect make decisions that affect our lives and our money.

By the way, it’s the law.

Funny thing, though: No matter what they say, politicians will do everything they can to make sure citizens don’t get all the information they’re entitled to by law — if the politicians think it will make them look bad, generate controversy, or even cause people to question them. They hate questions. 

Occasionally this distaste for being challenged by questions or dissenting opinions leaks out in public forums. But it really shines through in private interactions, like interviews. Then the questioner might get berated, yelled at or even threatened — either during the interview, or later, sometimes in a public forum. 

Another funny thing: The more politicians crow about how “transparent” they are, or will be, the less that’s the case. 

Which is why it came as no real surprise that Supervisor Tim Hubbard’s pledge to have the most transparent administration in the history of the town has, in its first year, proven itself to be quite the opposite. 

We expect to be attacked for this opinion. We’ve been attacked before. That’s a tried-and-true political playbook, after all. And attacking news reporters is more in vogue now than it’s ever been, especially in an era where “fact” is a relative concept and reporters have been jeered as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” by the once and future president.

So why bother, you might ask? Why not just publish only “good news,” positive things that make our town “look good?” It sure would be easier, printing press releases and taking at face value whatever anodyne quote some PR person or political aide writes out in an email for attribution to the elected official who refuses to give actual interviews. 

But, to quote President-elect Donald J. Trump: “You can’t let people get away with bullshit.” (Oh, the irony!)

Trump’s words are a very plain-spoken way of describing one part of our mission as news reporters. And the day we stop taking that seriously is the day it’s time to hang up our spurs. That day has not arrived. We’re not ready to let people get away with bullshit. Especially when there’s taxpayer money involved.

There are a couple of things you should know about this right now. (There is more to come.)

The town supervisor says he’d rather be interviewed by email than on the phone. This is a common practice now among elected officials, executives in private companies and government bureaucrats — including people whose jobs are to provide information to the press. It allows for more control over what “gets out” to the public.

“I would rather answer any journalist’s questions via an email, because I know what I said and what is said isn’t always portrayed in the press. So if I got it in black and white, I have a leg to stand on,” Hubbard said in a Nov. 18 phone interview. “So I think a lot of people have been very upset with the way things are reported — maybe half truths, maybe some truth, maybe some twisted,” he said. The supervisor said this doesn’t apply “just” to us. “I’m saying that this is a general feeling of journalism and the press,” he said. He also said this works well with other reporters.

We can’t speak for “other reporters,” of course, but in our opinion, interviews by email are not interviews at all. They are canned statements that typically don’t answer the questions posed or provide meaningful information. And odds are they are written by or with the intervention of someone other than the person we’d like to interview.

This seems a good place to point out that Hubbard has not once complained to us about being misquoted, or having his words taken out of context.

Also, if having a record of what he says to reporters is truly what’s important to him, he can easily use a digital recorder or a web-based recording and transcription service to create that record from an interview. That’s what we do when interviewing politicians.

“Interviewing” by email provides no opportunity for meaningful dialogue. It does not allow for follow-up questions. When the answer is nonresponsive we can’t press for a meaningful response. If the answer raises another question, we can’t ask it. We believe this is actually the point. Follow-up emails, we find, are often simply ignored.   

So, when we seek an interview and must instead ask questions by email and get emailed “answers,” we will make sure we always identify the exchange as having taken place by email. And when the interview subject declines to be interviewed, we will state that, too. Likewise when the person answering our email simply ignores some of the questions, we will make note of that in the article too. The public deserves to know this is going on. And it should, at the very least, raise some eyebrows and lead to some questions.

If a person has nothing to hide, they don’t act like they have something to hide. 

We believe that part of our job is the way Trump put it: “You can’t let people get away with bullshit.” Especially people bestowed with the public trust, who have a fiduciary duty to their constituents and a legal obligation to the state, to do the right thing with public funds, policy and laws.

We are writing about this now because it was very much an issue in our reporting about the expenditure of town funds on the hockey rink project. (You can read that story here.)

Two key town officials, the supervisor, who is the town’s chief fiscal officer, and Council Member Ken Rothwell, who has pushed hard for the rink, both declined to return calls for phone interviews and instead emailed responses to some of the questions reporter Alek Lewis reluctantly posed by email. 

Neither official answered any of the questions Alek posed in his email about specific expenditures and sources of funding. Instead, they sent statements denying that the expenditures made at the ice rink site were made specifically for the rink— even though the site improvements were promised by the town in its agreement with Peconic Hockey Foundation.

The improvements, including a large new paved parking lot, an expensive septic system and bathrooms, are needed to serve the entire park, they said. The fact that the town promised these improvements as a condition of Peconic Hockey Foundation agreeing to build its domed rink on town-owned property, to donate the rink to the town, and to operate the rink for the town apparently has nothing to do with it. And the fact that these improvements literally abut the rink facility also have nothing to do with it, no matter how this might appear, they say. Yet, Rothwell explained at the site on Veterans Day — when the town celebrated the cherry blossom trees dedicated to veterans donated by families in their honor and planted along the parking lot outside the rink — that the permanent bathroom facility would have an entrance directly into the rink. But rest assured, that bathroom will be built to serve the entire park and all its visitors. 

Even if all of that is true — though we can’t help but be reminded of Trump’s advice — there’s something none of us should lose sight of here: There was never any public discussion about the total costs the town would incur for these improvements or how the town would pay for them.

These are budgetary matters that are not exempt from the State Open Meetings Law’s requirements for discussion in open sessions. 

Somehow, though, the town attorney seems to have decided that, since these obligations arise out of a contract, discussions of them are OK in closed-door “executive sessions.” Nowadays, the word “contractual” appears in the “executive session” agenda more and more frequently. But that word does not appear in the law and this interpretation is not consistent with the law.

But that’s the prevailing mindset. 

And it’s clearly exemplified in a Feb 9, 2023 email from town attorney Erik Howard to Rothwell, Peconic Hockey Foundation President Troy Albert, and two other people not in town government. It was written to explain changes he’d made to a draft of the proposed contract between the town and the hockey organization, to make the language more consistent with “typical license language,” he says.

He explains that “since this property is owned by the CDA [the Riverhead Community Development Agency] we do need to avoid a lease construction [language that creates a lease] since a lease would require the Town Board to hold a Qualified and Eligible Hearing, require certain financial submissions and thereafter make a determination that Peconic Hockey is a qualified and eligible sponsor.”

In other words, if the Peconic Hockey agreement could be construed as a lease, the town would have to do this out in the open, with public participation, as required by NY General Municipal Law. That law says when a municipality wants to sell, lease or “otherwise dispose of” real property in an urban renewal area “for any of the purposes” in the municipality’s urban renewal plan, it must hold a public hearing on the proposal and determine that the third-party is “qualified and eligible” by requiring and reviewing “certain financial submissions,” as the town attorney put it.

The land inside the Enterprise Park at Calverton, where the ice rinks are located, is within a town-designated urban renewal area. The town wants to create a “license” instead of a lease in order to avoid the transparency the law demands. 

Yes, there are legal differences between a lease and a license. But the town attorney’s email to Peconic Hockey makes his rationale abundantly clear: he wants to create a license because he believes it does away with the town’s obligation to comply with the law’s requirements — requirements intended to ensure transparency and public involvement, so that publicly owned property isn’t disposed of by cronyism via backroom deals. Get it?

Yet here we have a town official entrusted with protecting the public’s interest and its legal rights obviously motivated by the desire to avoid public scrutiny.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. And stop asking so many damned questions.

Like the man said: “You can’t let people get away with bullshit.” 

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