What
is the price for disloyalty in Steve Minarik’s Republican Party?
Maybe he has you replaced as local
party chair.
Maybe he revokes a promised county
job offer.
Maybe he vows not to support your
next bid for higher office.
Maybe.
“I want to tell you something: 12
years, being an elected official, I have never once been told how to vote or
what to do by Steve Minarik,” says Chili Supervisor Tracy Logel. “I get so
tired of reading it in the newspaper because it’s so blatantly off base. All
I’ve ever had from him is support for anything I’ve ever wanted to do.”
That may be, but Minarik’s
fingerprints are all over Chili these days.
For starters, he had Mary Sperr
removed as leader of the Chili Republican Party.
“I don’t think it was justified or
fair, but it’s not for me to decide,” she says. “If that’s the way he feels,
fine.”
Former supervisor Steve Hendershott
is out pounding the pavement after a promised county job has vanished.
And if Councilman Mike Slattery
intends to seek a rematch against state Assemblywoman Susan John, he might have
to do it without support — or money — from the county GOP.
“I’m not sure what provoked what,
but for sure we may have a better candidate there than Mike,” Minarik says.
“If there’s other repercussions, I
will deal with it,” Slattery responds. “I was elected by the people to do
what’s best for the people, and that’s what I’m going to continue to do.”
Such is the respect for Minarik’s
power and influence that Republicans refuse to say anything even remotely
critical of him, or even why they
won’t say anything critical — because they fear exactly what’s taking place
in Chili right now.
“The supervisor’s supposed to, along
with the town board, run town government. Not Steve Minarik from downtown,”
says Councilman Jim Powers, the lone Democrat on the board. “I don’t think that
downtown should dictate to any party in the way Minarik has interfered. And who
knows how much in the past he has interfered with things out here?”
Minarik denies having anything to do
with the operation of Chili town government.
“I have everything to do with the
operation of the Chili Republican Party. That’s my job,” he says. “I don’t know
the first thing about town government, so I am absolutely not involved. I am
only interested in getting people in my party to work together.”
Days before
Logel took
office, Chili board members voted unanimously to move the town’s finance
director, Dianne O’Meara, to the vacant comptroller position. They did this
because they knew Logel intended to replace O’Meara.
“She’s [O’Meara] worked through
three administrations. She’s done a satisfactory job as far as I’m concerned,” Powers
says. “I read her resume and I read that of the gentleman Mrs. Logel was
planning to bring in. Dianne’s background was far superior.”
The comptroller essentially has the
same job description as finance director. The difference is, the town board can
appoint a comptroller, but the position of finance director is appointed by the
supervisor alone.
“We wanted to retain the municipal
experience of Dianne and felt there was no need to be replacing her with
someone who is going to have to have a learning curve,” says Councilwoman Ginny
Ignatowski. “You already have a new supervisor and a new secretary to the
supervisor. To sit there and have those two new people plus a new finance
director…”
O’Meara did not return calls for
comment.
The decision did not sit well with
Minarik or Logel — who was in the audience when the board made the
appointment.
“She stomped out. She was out in the
hallway stomping her feet and on the telephone immediately,” Powers says.
At some point during the meeting,
Powers says, a note was delivered to the dais.
“The note said, ‘Minarik wants to
meet with you now,'” Ignatowski says. “I was like, ‘Well, what does that mean?’
I passed it off to Steve [Hendershott] and he just set it there.”
“I wanted them to be able to take a
timeout to sit and talk about this,” Minarik says. “To my knowledge, no
discussion had been had on this. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even aware of
it, not that it matters. So much for my impact on Chili, right?”
Ignatowski thought Logel wanted to
have her own meeting with the board following that meeting.
“That was my impression,” she says.
“Michael [Slattery] had the impression that they wanted us to stop the meeting
at that very moment and have this phone conversation with Minarik.”
Logel wouldn’t comment on the note,
but called board members’ version of the story “a very big distortion.”
Replacing
O’Meara was
nothing personal, Logel says. State law allows the supervisor to appoint a
finance director and, she says, she heard O’Meara was looking for another job
anyhow.
“Now, should I have gone to her and
asked her? Perhaps,” Logel says. “But it was reliable sources.”
Logel is entitled to appoint four
positions in the town: finance director, her own secretary, town historian, and
deputy supervisor. The rest of the appointments are subject to the town board’s
approval.
“Every supervisor that I’ve talked
to in other towns has advised me to surround myself with highly qualified
people in those four positions, and that’s exactly what I was trying to do,” Logel
says.
Specifically, Logel wanted to hire
Kodak retiree and Webster resident Andrew Bartlett as finance director.
Bartlett, while a former financial analyst at Kodak, does not have any
municipal experience, board members say.
“So what?” Logel responds. “Neither
did she [O’Meara] when she started here. What does that have to do with
anything?”
Not hiring Bartlett is “a loss for
the town of Chili,” Logel says. “This man could have brought innovative,
innovative things.”
“You know, institutional memory [another
reason board members say they kept O’Meara] is just plain doing things the way
we’ve always done it and let’s not change,” she adds. “Change is good. Change,
never is bad.”
Bartlett, according to Ignatowski,
was recommended by Steve Minarik.
Board members
past and present are now paying the price for their decision.
Sperr was removed as head of the
local party three days after the comptroller vote.
“I feel bad about that,” Minarik
says. “I kind of like Mary, actually. But there seemed to be a refusal to want
to work together on the town board and you can’t have that. You can’t have
Republicans not working together. I want people working together because it’s
the only way Republicans can win.”
Logel wouldn’t comment on Sperr’s
removal.
Because Hendershott was technically
still in office when the vote came down, he, too, is suffering the
consequences. The promise of a job with Monroe County has been revoked. The
Republican board members wrote Minarik a letter, Powers says, asking him not to
blame Hendershott for their actions, but they haven’t gotten a response.
Minarik isn’t aware of any job offer
for Hendershott.
“I doubt that,” he says. “There’s
absolutely no connection between where people work and politics. They’re
separate issues.”
Logel, too, Powers says, tried to
retaliate by initially not appointing board members as liaisons to different
departments within the town. Logel wrongly thought, he says, that would make
them part-time employees and board members “wouldn’t get their hospitalization
or other benefits.”
“That’s Tracy. She just flies off
the handle once in a while,” Powers says. “You don’t dare contradict her. If
you do, then beware. She’s a very difficult lady to get along with.”
The town’s personnel policy, Sperr
says, states that elected officials are considered full-time employees.
Logel denies any attempt at
retaliation. At a recent board meeting, she put board members on committees and
those committees will serve as the liaisons.
The
comptroller controversy has been overshadowed by talk of missing and deleted files
at Town Hall.
“That’s not talk. That, in my
office, is hard-core truth,” Logel says. “All the files in this room were
empty. Plus, the computer was erased. There was nothing on it. Not a single
file.”
Specifically, Logel says, she is
looking for things like employee performance appraisals and documents related
to projects the previous administration was working on.
Reports of a possible police
investigation are overblown, Logel says, but she did have an informal
conversation with Capt. Michael Nyhan, of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
“Can you suspect that a crime was
committed? Can you suspect that there’s things missing? Yeah,” she says. “Were
these files empty when he [Hendershott] was here? No. People know that. I don’t
believe that you have all of these file cabinets sitting around to keep them
vacant.”
Hendershott and the Republican board
members argue that everything Logel is looking for is there. Hendershott would
not talk with City on the record, but
did submit a written statement:
“I left the office exactly as I
found it when I came in, including six file cabinets full of records. Any town
record not in those files can be found in the files of the town clerk’s office
or in the files of the various departments,” he writes. “Prior to January 1
[when Logel took office], I and my staff were available to meet with Tracy to
help with transition. She only asked to meet with me once very briefly and
never had her secretary meet with mine.”
“I provided her with everything she
asked for,” he adds. “The campaign is over. Tracy needs to stop waging this
personal vendetta against me and focus on doing the job of supervisor that she
was elected to do.”
Logel didn’t come in, she says,
because she didn’t feel welcome.
“I came in [the first time] and I
said then that I knew it was difficult, I knew it was not comfortable for him,
but I would like to come in and find out where everything was,” she says.
She specifically wanted to meet with
O’Meara and Hendershott’s secretary, Logel says, and the request “was not met
with open arms.”
“It could have been a lot easier
than it was,” she says.
Ask Logel to
describe her
leadership style and she’ll tell you she favors a no-nonsense, laissez-faire
approach to management.
“I don’t micromanage. It’s not my
place to do your job,” she says. “My leadership style is to surround myself
with people who are more capable than me, who can do the job, because they make
me look good. That’s the mark of good management.”
But some of Logel’s fellow board
members say the supervisor is hyper-sensitive, takes offense easily, and does
not work cooperatively, instead bulldozing over anyone who gets in her way.
“It’s her way or no way. She does
not take criticism well,” Powers says. “I think she’s a vindictive individual.
She’ll use [the] bully pulpit she now occupies to beat on her enemies.”
“It’s going to be a rough two
years,” he adds. (Two years is the length of Logel’s term.)
Board members point to the committee
assignments as an example of Logel’s unilateralism. They had no voice, they
say, in which departments or boards they act as liaison to.
“She did not ask any of us about
this,” Sperr says.
Republican board members are a
little more careful with their choice of words when describing the Logel style.
“We have every intention of working
with her,” Sperr says. “It doesn’t have to be volatile. We should be focusing
on moving forward, not aiming at the past administration.”
Going to the police about alleged
missing files is classic Logel, Ignatowski says.
“She is trying to breed mistrust in
us,” she says. “She’s just putting this stuff out there whether there’s any
validity to it or not.”
Ignatowski feels freer to speak her
mind, she says, because she doesn’t have political aspirations beyond the town
board.
“I am not here for power or anything
else like that. I’m trying to do what I felt God wanted me to do, to serve
people. If it should happen to be that it’s only for four years, then that’s
whatever the plan is,” she says. “I can’t even begin to guess what’s going to
happen tomorrow. I don’t base my vote on how this will effect me and my
reelection. Perhaps that’s why politicians have such a bad name.”
Such
characterizations of her are unfair, Logel says, when board members haven’t
even taken the time to get to know her.
“I’ve had one caucus with them in
which they basically said very little, then went into the organizational
meeting and did superimpose their agenda,” she says. “At this point in the
game, I can’t imagine how they could even make comments like that, because they
have no idea who I am. They’ve made no effort whatsoever to work with me from
the day I won the primary.”
“I’m surprised that people would
make statements about people that they have no idea what they’re about,” she
adds. “They don’t know me as a human being.”
Ideally, everyone would have gotten
to know each other on the campaign trail, Logel says, but knee surgery
prevented her from going door-to-door with the Republican board members.
The other board members resent her,
Logel says, and are trying to hold on to any part of the Hendershott
administration they can.
“I’ve worked for the last 10 years
in the county and two years before that on the [Chili] town board. Never have I
been disappointed like this,” she says. “I feel badly for them that they are so
unable to move past this. I expected more of them.”
The resentment is so strong, Logel
says, she avoids being alone with her fellow board members.
“I have not gone behind closed doors
with them,” she says. “I’ve made sure I’m never alone.”
Asked how they treat her privately,
Logel responds, “I’d rather not say.”
Logel has been
quoted as
saying that the board committed “political suicide” when it made O’Meara
comptroller. But, she says, people misunderstand what she meant.
Nearly ninety percent of Chili’s
population voted for her or Democratic candidate Jason Elliotto in November’s
general election, she says, despite the fact that Hendershott was also in the
race.
“We had 89 percent of the population
saying, ‘We don’t want Hendershott.’ That’s a high number,” she says. “If you
say 89 percent of the people don’t want this administration and this style, why
would you continue the same modus operandi? That’s what I mean by political
suicide.”
“Maybe if you print what political
suicide is,” she adds, “they’ll understand themselves when they read it.”
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2004.
