Controversy over board member’s Facebook post spurs Riverhead clerk to reconsider correspondence policy

Amid accusations of playing politics with Town Board meeting agendas, Riverhead Town Clerk James Wooten says he is considering ending publication of residents’ letters in Town Board agenda packets, or at least revising the correspondence policy posted on the town clerk’s webpage.

Two residents wrote to the Town Board complaining about a Facebook post by Council Member Joann Waski about Kevin Shea of Baiting Hollow, a Democratic candidate for Town Board last year and a NYC firefighter seriously injured in the collapse of the South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001. 

In the Sept. 7 post, days before the 25th anniversary of the terror attack, Waski criticized Shea for using language to describe the attack that she believed to be irreverent. During the July 21 Town Board meeting, Shea initially called the attack an “accident,” drawing an immediate correction from Council Member Ken Rothwell, who said it was a terrorist attack, not an accident. Supervisor Jerry Halpin, who ran on the same Democratic Party ticket with Shea last year, told Shea the attack was an “act of war.” Shea explained he meant to say “incident,” which is how the attack was officially referred to in fire and police logs, he said. 

In her Facebook post, Waski chided Shea for being disrespectful and seemed to tie his comment to his affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of American, an organization Shea belongs to. “This is what socialism looks like when history is rewritten and reality is diminished,” Waski wrote. The Riverhead News-Review first reported Waski’s post last week.

“How disgusting to call 9/11 an “accident”. Really think about that. Mr. Shea did try to bail himself out and call it an “incident”. The truth, he does not believe that it was a terrorist attack and believes that there would have been a different outcome had there been different doors on the plane,” Waski wrote. She went on to praise Rothwell for correcting Shea and “for recognizing 9/11 for what it actually was. WE MUST NEVER FORGET….all while others are trying to change the narrative.”

Shea was the sole survivor from Engine Company 40, Ladder Company 35 that responded to the World Trade Center after the attack. He was off-duty on Sept. 11, but was volunteering at the firehouse. When the call came in and he learned there was an open seat on the engine, he asked the officer for permission to jump on the truck and responded to the scene. 

According to reporting by the New York Times, Shea was partially buried in the collapse of the South Tower, where he was rescued from the rubble, unconscious, by two FDNY firefighters moments before the North Tower fell. When they felt it rumbling, they put him on a backboard and raced away, ducking into an alley and then into a garage on the corner of  West and Albany Street, one of his rescuers told the Times. 

Shea had fractured his neck in three places and severed his thumb. When he regained consciousness in the hospital, he had no memory of what happened. He suffered long-term amnesia.

“…I can’t remember anything, no matter how hard I try,” Shea told the Times reporter after his release from the hospital. The reporter had tracked him down at his firehouse in Manhattan after he learned of his rescue. “It’s like my memory collapsed with the building, and now I have to piece the whole thing back together again,” Shea told the reporter. Still wearing a rigid neck brace, with a large gash visible on his skull, and his hand bandaged, Shea wasn’t cleared to return to work, but he was volunteering there to answer phones.

It’s been a long road back. He worked with doctors to regain basic memories, the Times reported.  He retired from the NYC fire department and settled in Baiting Hollow 20 years ago. He’s a volunteer firefighter with the Riverhead Fire Department. In conversation, Shea still struggles with language, sometimes asking for help to find the right word he wants to use. He did this several times during an interview last week with RiverheadLOCAL, when he turned to his partner, Versha Gupta, who accompanied him. 

Shea said he remains perplexed by Waski’s post. He concluded it was “politically motivated.”

Local residents Allyson Matwey of Wading River and Colin Tooker of Riverhead wrote to the Town Board on Sept. 10 each wrote letters to the Town Board complaining about Waski’s Sept. 7 post. They cc’d the town clerk with the expectation that their letters would be incorporated into the published meeting agenda packet. 

Matwey addressed her letter to Waski directly, calling her Facebook post, among other things, “horrific and disrespectful,” and beneath her position as a public servant. She chided the councilwoman for apparently not having checked Shea’s own 9/11 story before maligning his reputation.

Tooker said “Waski’s entire attack on Kevin’s character is also based on the meaning of that one word, which he had already clarified at the end of his remarks.” Shea is “painfully aware every day of the events of 9/11, and every person in this town owes him their gratitude and respect,” Tooker wrote. 

Matwey and Tooker both expressed surprise that Wooten refused to publish the letters. 

In an email to Matwey, Wooten said her email was “directed to the board.” He explained his decision to exclude it from the published agenda packet. 

“There is no public record within the towns government web site: it appears to be generated via social media blog, specifically I believe Facebook, therefor this is not a matter that pertains to the public in general in regard to legislation and zoning decisions.”  [As written.]

Wooten told Tooker there is no Town Board policy for publishing correspondence and the matter is left to his discretion.

The town clerk’s page on the town’s website contains a statement titled “TOWN BOARD MEETING CORRESPONDENCE.”  It states that as of January 2024, “All correspondence received in the Town Clerk’s Office before 10 am the Friday prior to the scheduled Town Board meeting will be listed on the agenda for the upcoming Town Board meeting. Any correspondence received after that hour will be added to the next scheduled Town Board Meeting.”

Wooten subsequently began including letters he receives in the Town Board’s agenda packet. He recently added a requirement that the letter-writer must be a town resident in order to have a letter published with the agenda. 

“I’m very concerned that Mr. Wooten feels he has the authority to limit constituents’ rights to free speech, however I’m not surprised by it. Our current town officials have shown little respect for either their constituents or the Constitution,” Tooker told RiverheadLOCAL in an email.

“I thought by publishing correspondence I would help people in different communities around town understand what people in other communities were thinking,” Wooten said in a phone interview Monday. “It was probably naive of me, but I really was all done to the best of intentions,” he said. 

Wooten said social media has changed conversations about everything. “I don’t go on there. I don’t dwell there. That is not my life. My life is with people, not with opinions. Not with screens.” 

He said Waski’s post was a “private post” that does not belong on a government website…It’s not correspondence, as far as I’m concerned.”

Wooten said his decision not to publish Matwey’s and Tooker’s letters had “absolutely nothing to do with” what they said about Waski.

Wooten said he is now reconsidering publishing correspondence addressed to the board as part of the agenda. 

“I genuinely thought [publishing correspondence] was a good thing, and it’s turned into a poster board for special interests,” Wooten said. “Anyone who knows me knows I will always go out of my way to accommodate anyone, no matter who you are,” he said. 

“What I thought was a step forward for the community turns out to be going backwards. I’m not sure whether we’re going to continue to publish correspondence,” he said. “Correspondence gets circulated to the whole board.” It doesn’t have to be published, he said. “I spoke to the town attorney, and they said, really, it’s your decision, Jim. You started publishing these things.” 

In a phone call on Monday, Waski expressed reluctance to give an on-the-record interview about the controversy surrounding her Facebook post concerning Shea.

Shea has now filed an ethics complaint with the town’s ethics committee about Waski’s post, which he alleges was posted with “malicious intent” and “active malice” and “with the intent to defame” him “for political and personal gain.”

Shea also states in the complaint that Rothwell, in a published interview in the Riverhead News-Review “supported the libel narrative with the statement: ‘it wasn’t an accident, and I just think that we can’t allow anybody to rewrite history.”

Waski said late Monday afternoon that she’d learned of Shea’s ethics complaint and has been advised not to grant an interview for this article.