The bad news coming out of the Warren administration is becoming serious.
This morning’s attention grabber: According to the Albany Times-Union and the Democrat and Chronicle, state troopers say they stopped Warren’s speeding car last Wednesday on the Thruway. At the wheel, driving Warren
to Albany for the governor’s State of the State address, was Warren’s uncle, Reggie Hill, whom she has hired to be her security guard.
Troopers say the car was going 97 miles an hour. According to the T-U, Warren’s spokesperson, Chris Christopher, says Hill told her he was “exceeding 80” but wasn’t going faster than 90.
And, according to the T-U’s report, Christopher says Hill also told her that “it is standard security protocol to travel faster than the average speed” on the Thruway.
But, the T-U says this: “Vehicle and Traffic Law, however, gives no exception to abiding by speed limits — 65 mph on the Thruway — for security details. Only law enforcement officers in law enforcement vehicles responding to emergencies get to break the speed limit, the law says.”
This is terrible, on many fronts, beginning with safety: the mayor’s, and that of everybody else on the Thruway.
And you have to wonder whether Warren realizes just how bad this is. She was already under fire both for hiring security guards and for hiring her uncle as one of them. Since her election, some of her critics have been practically rooting for her to fail. This kind of stuff plays right into their hands.
Critics will also point to it as evidence that Warren is unethical and arrogant.
Whether the critics are right or this was a momentary lapse, it shows an astonishing lack of judgment. Elected officials and public employees are not above the law, and to justify dangerous behavior with an “everybody does it” shrug is appalling.
Warren has a lot on her plate right now. She has just added a major PR problem to the list.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2014.
Media types are paying a lot of attention to the 97 mph thing this morning, but it’s nothing so significant that a few days elapsed time won’t blow over. An apology would not hurt.
If Warren feels that these “executive services” are warranted, I think the city council and residents will for the most part support her. She should stick with her commitment to post the jobs to be filled through some normal process, sooner rather than later.
Lovely…there are two Rochesters. One Rochester gets away with extremely dangerous speeding on the Thruway. The other Rochester gets arrested, fined and maybe loses its license. Lovely…you’re doing a wonderful job illustrating the two Rochesters.
Lovely…people are watching.
So repeat after me….
I MUST SET A GOOD EXAMPLE
I MUST SET A GOOD EXAMPLE
I MUST SET A GOOD EXAMPLE
It was wrong that Hill was speeding, true. But he was doing so b/c his experience in as part of the Executive Services detail for three former governors (Pataki, Paterson and Cuomo) told him that he could. Warren can’t be blamed for this. And since I know CITY Newspaper repeatedly endorsed Lovely’s primary opponent, even after he had withdrawn for personal reasons, this article could only be considered another personal attack on the new mayor by said paper.
Sean…does Hill know that Lovely isn’t the Governor? One of Lovely’s duties is to foster public safety. Driving 97 mph is simply not safe. And how about simply setting a good example? Lovely should have noticed they were passing every car on the Thruway and she should have told him to slow down.
Lovely needs to apologize and promise it will not happen again. It is not as if she is important like a fire fighter or EMT. There is no reason for the mayor of Rochester to be speeding…none.
Two Rochesters…two Rochesters.
Another day, another Warren scandal with plenty of lies.It is not enough that she has an appointee that had a DUI last year but did not think it was important enough to mention (I guess he knows what Warren is looking for), or an appointee with conflicts of interest, or that she uses nepotism to fill positions in her administration. No, now we have her head of security endangering the lives of everyone he passed on the highway at a recklessly high speed, and he is not given a ticket. a little corruption perhaps? and today, the mayor (“I am the mayor”) claimed that he was only going 77-80 mph, which is still illegal, even though she had just said that she was not paying attention and did not know th speed he was driving. She can’t have it both ways, and I think if I was in a car doing almost 100, I would have a feeling of being at high speed. All of this in less than 2 weeks in office. Whaat can we look forward to in the next 206 weeks?
High political positions, which include the Mayor or Rochester, have intense on going scrutiny of almost every decision, comment, and behavior while in office. It is the nature of the beast. I am going to have hope than our new mayor will grow into this reality and that the promises of her new administration have potential .
Democrat NJ Fmr. Gov. Jon Corzine was critically injured a few years ago in a very similar incident that ended in a crash on the Garden State Parkway. (His detail was speeding back to the mansion for high-level consultations with Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team. )
That scandal, and Corzine’s general ineptitude, begat President-designate Chris Christie. Corzine returned to Wall Street and proceeded to lose hundreds of millions in client money. There is a lesson somewhere.
One simple reminder folks: The City of Rochester does NOT have a Chief of Police at this critical public safety juncture. But Warren has made sure that she has all the protection she and her family need and even found a way to improve the financial security of her own family members a the same time. If she had been concentrating on our community and not Uncle Reggie and sparkling new vehicles, perhaps she could have taken the time to make sure that we at least have police leadership in place. All this raises serious questions that Warren really understands her job, her community and the fundamentals of ethical leadership. As Democrats, we can not call out Maggie Brooks for her abysmal ethical track record and we cannot excuse Warren either. DEMOCRATS must demand a higher standard in City Hall.
If she actually received threats that led to her hiring of a security team the police should be involved and investigating. Threats, especially against an African American woman and a public figure, may be a hate crime. The correct response is a police detail and investigation, not nepotism. We need, as the public, to see the threats that motivated this decision and hear about the ongoing police investigation if there is one.
If there isn’t one, we have to ask why security was hired in the first place.
I’m sure the Mayor’s Office has a budget. I know that there were many (useless) people on the office payroll who retained their jobs year after year because they were supporters of the Park Ave Democrats. Assuming a number of those have been axed, perhaps Lovely has found the money to pay for her security. And her security, based on what I’ve seen via online comments, seems to be a priority
Why won’t someone do the easily accessible background research on this nonsense and give us some honest data that we can use to make informed decisions?
The City’s Anti-Nepotism Policy is available online now. I can not see how Warren can possibly be in compliance. It is doubtful she even read the policy.
She totally has influence over his position and she totally influenced his hiring. Why did she do this to our community?
From the policy:
“The employment of relatives in positions where one has supervisory responsibility or influence over the other’s status or job security is regarded as a potential violation of this policy.”
“Administrative staff is prohibited from influencing the employment (hire, promotion…) of anyone who is a family member.”
The ethics review of this situation can’t happen until the ethics committee is fully “staffed”–it is down by two members. Can it be right that Lovely gets to appoint those people?
What else is she going to try and pull off in four years….
If you have never learned the difference between wrong and right. You will probably make the wrong choice. Within 2 minutes of meeting our Mayor I was able to ascertain that she doesn’t like white Males and puts conversations about Women’s Fashions over having a conversation with a constituent concerning her policies. Her recent actions reveal to me that she has very little concern about others.
I would really like to hear more about Uncle Reggie’s qualifications. I understand he was a state trooper for many years – that’s a good start – but the security he provided for governors is of particular interest to me. Did he participate in the planning and coordination of said security, or was he simply one of many state troopers that served on the detail? Was he responsible for driving the governor around or did he sit in his cruiser blocking access to a side road while the governor’s vehicle drove past? Was he permanently assigned to the governor’s detail or did he only participate when the gov was in the Rochester area?
The fact that he was a state trooper may be enough to be considered “qualified” – I don’t know. What I do know is that the mayor’s office has repeatedly cited his past as a member of the governor’s security detail – first as justification for hiring him, then as justification for traveling at reckless speeds on the thruway.
Lovely is going to send Rochester the way Detroit has gone. She is going to squander city coffer’s on her own narcissistic agenda to be famous. She doesn’t care about ethics. She is about taking credit for herself and not being accountable for her mistakes. If a mistake is made she wants to sweap it under a weave and not deal with it until it can no longer be ignored and then she will point the finger. Her ya know bla bla bla ya know might warm the hearts of her un and under educated voters. Her buying her Lafamilia SUV’s to her around in might draw a tear to her voters eyes who have gotten family members jobs at Kodak and such. Yet the lets give em work cause they are family is part of what tanked companies in Rochester! Why take school seriously when your family holds a spot for you at a company. Companies need a better pool of qualified workers these days. The days of family getting family a job is over. Yet Lovely fails to see that such has corrupted companies here to either leave town or downsize to weed out the unqualified workers. She wants to enforce the urban dictionary and try to bring in ghetto justice politics. Yet we have Sudan refugees and they can tell you such doesn’t work. She plays the victim to get what she wants… Yep she said she was threatened but no proof. She plays the child… Ignores the mistake she made and hopes you will just go away and forget. Look she put her nose in and held up college town because she needed her mark on it something she could boast about. Now she has done it with Costco and other projects that were in the works by others way before she was mayor. Yet she put her mark on it so she could be famous in her mind. She is narcissistic and she will tank Rochester.