by Alex Brooks
[private]At the meeting, newly-elected Mayor Robert Allen invited the public to comment on the issue at hand, which was whether to continue to have the Glens Falls law firm FitzGerald Morris Baker Firth represent the Village on PFOA matters. To Allen’s surprise, the public had no comments to offer about this, so the Board went into executive session to discuss the matter. About half an hour later, they came back out into public session and voted unanimously to terminate the firm’s representation of the Village.
Immediately after that, Deputy Mayor Bob Ryan made a motion to waive the Village’s attorney-client privilege in relation to invoicing by Fitzgerald Morris of its work for the village. This was also passed unanimously. Brendan Lyons of the Times Union had recently made a FOIL request for all of the invoices from Fitzgerald Morris to the Village since the firm began work for Hoosick Falls in November of 2015, and he was given less than half of the billing statements, and some that were released had sections blacked out. After the Village Board passed this motion, all of the billing statements, about 50 pages of them, were released.
Mayor Allen said after the meeting that communications between the former Mayor and attorneys at Fitzgerald Morris were released to him last week, and he has been reviewing them. He said he “was taken aback by the way things were handled.” He said he was surprised at some of the things he was reading. When he shared some comments about the e-mails he was reading with other members of the Village Board, he was further surprised to find that they also were surprised to learn about what had been going on behind the scenes. He said “there was a lot they didn’t know,” and “they were pretty shocked by it.”
Allen would not go into details of what specifically they were surprised by. He didn’t want to talk about the past, except to say that the Board wants to follow a different path, and they felt they needed new legal representation to do so. “This is about moving forward, and being open and transparent.”
Two settlement agreements produced by Fitzgerald Morris from the lengthy negotiations between Saint Gobain and Honeywell and the Village were rejected by the Village Board, with former Mayor Borge being the only one in favor of them, and those agreements came in for heavy criticism from many professionals with extensive experience in this kind of agreement.
Allen said the Village will now begin looking for a new attorney to represent them in PFOA matters.
The Village owes about $450,000 to Fitzgerald Morris. Allen said he is continuing to pursue avenues initiated by former Mayor Borge to borrow money to pay that bill. [/private]