County Hall pettiness in eye of beholder

Updated: 04/09/09 10:29 AM
By Matthew Spina
NEWS STAFF REPORTER

The latest chill between Erie County Executive Chris Collins and County Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz involves a refrigerator. Collins staff members bought a new one for their 16th-floor suite after the old one died. The comptroller’s bill payers — citing a policy laid down before Collins or Poloncarz held office — kicked the invoice back.

Team Collins had to explain how the fridge would be “directly used in providing county services,” the standard first imposed by then-Comptroller Nancy A. Naples in 2001. Since then, county departments that wanted refrigerators, microwave ovens or toasters for their break rooms usually paid for them out of their employees’ pockets.

So far, the Collins staff has not persuaded Poloncarz to pay the $416 to Rosa's Home Store.

Tuesday, the county executive’s appointees — after a review of parking assignments — barred Poloncarz’s two deputy comptrollers from parking in the garage under the Rath County Office Building.

That’s when Poloncarz turned his auditors loose on the parking operation itself. They started to review how spaces are assigned to county employees under the Rath Building and elsewhere downtown.

Collins and Poloncarz spoke by telephone the day before.

It didn’t go well. “He called me irrelevant and said the comptroller’s office is irrelevant, and then he said some other things that were personal in nature,” Poloncarz said of Collins.

Poloncarz said he accused Collins of pettiness for throwing the comptroller’s deputies out of the garage when the focus of his ire was on Poloncarz himself.

Previous Erie County county executives have butted heads with comptrollers. Alfreda W. Slominski for a time had to file a Freedom of Information request if she wanted a copy of Dennis T. Gorski’s budgets.

Naples and Joel A. Giambra started off well, and Giambra instructed his departments to follow the Naples policy on appliance purchases. But by the middle of Giambra’s second term, each was making complaints about the other. In that climate, the state comptroller at the time, the now-disgraced

Alan G. Hevesi, declared Erie County in need of “adult supervision” and recommended a state-appointed control board.

The Collins-Poloncarz spat has political underpinnings. Collins and the Republican Party are trolling for a business-world opponent to run this year against Poloncarz, a Democrat. It’s also possible that Poloncarz will run against Collins in 2011.

The comptroller’s bill payers have kicked back other Collins expenses over the months. They denied the $860 for 1,000 patches that Collins, an active Scout leader, bought in order to hand out to Scouts as a special salute from Erie County. The patches had been shipped to Collins’ home in Clarence.

The billpayers denied a shipping charge for a package that went from Collins’ office to his political consultant in Arlington, Va. Nor would they pay another $25 charge to ship a package from Collins’ office to the United Bank for Africa in New York City. A Collins spokesman said the package did not involve any of Collins' corporate interests and was a personal matter. In each case, the bills were later paid without county dollars.

Poloncarz said that when they spoke, Collins hardly mentioned the 15-cubic-foot Frigidaire. The county executive instead focused on the fact that his hotel bill from a trip to Albany in September had not been fully reimbursed. Collins apparently had not given the hotel the special form that lets government employees avoid taxes during travel involving official business. Poloncarz’s staff refused to reimburse him for the $40 in taxes he paid.

“This is getting about as petty as it gets,” Collins spokesman Grant Loomis said about the stalemate with the comptroller’s office five floors below. “There is a kitchenette in the county executive’s office. This is a county-owned facility. We host visitors. We offer refreshments. Often those refreshments are paid for by sources other than county tax dollars. I think that no one except for those on the 11th floor would think that having a $400 refrigerator is inappropriate.”

As for the fact that Poloncarz’s deputies can no longer park under the Rath Building, Loomis said that decision stems from a weeks-long review. There are too few parking spaces for visitors to the county building, he said. And Collins, as part of his attempt to change the government’s culture, wants to offer a space to an “employee of the month.” Three employees in departments the county executive controls also lost spaces, Loomis said.