This Week’s Letters to the Editor

Editor’s Note: The Letters to the Editor section in the Woodbridge Town Chronicle is a place where community voices can be shared and heard. In the print newspapers of years past, letters to the editor were often the liveliest section, where readers spoke directly to one another, the broader community, and its leaders. To submit a letter for consideration please refer to the submission guidelines.

A ‘fox in the hen house’ at Amity

To the editor,

After the close of the 2000-2001 fiscal year, ABOE auditors identified the ABOE was asleep at the switch with a multimillion-dollar unanticipated budget deficit. As a Woodbridge BOF member, I helped lead the charge to reform ABOE and was selected by the Town to join ABOE in the midst of its to-date record-setting 17 failed budget votes.

On ABOE, I became a leader of the Amity Special Review Committee; charged to investigate the prior ABOE actions that led to the huge deficit and to make fiscal and governance recommendations to prevent repeat.

ABOE was found to be undisciplined, untrusted by taxpayers, unable to plan and follow operating and capital budgets and identify or implement prudent fiscal policies, and lacking in good governance. With this investigation completed, I helped draft the enabling 2003 Amity Finance Committee (AFC) bylaw to prevent a repeat disaster.

Now almost a generation later, history appears ready to repeat itself.

AFC — with membership split evenly between ABOE members and representatives from the three BOFs — was designed in 2003 to assure the proper and perpetual oversight of ABOE financial matters with:

• monthly or more frequent Town BOF oversight;
• changes in governance to prevent ABOE chairperson from having the “authority to make, second or vote upon motions at AFC meetings”; and
• a failsafe requirement for ABOE to publicize whenever AFC disagreed with ABOE’s annual budget proposal so that voters would be aware that ABOE was once again off the rails.

The ABOE has eviscerated the AFC — it’s a mockery of the original policy — by overriding the AFC bylaw and permitting the ABOE Chairperson to vote, the governance was destroyed, and by deleting the publicization requirement, no one knows.

The intent was to prevent the fox from being in the hen house. The ABOE is back in the hen house…

— Leonard Bell, MD

The writer was a member of the Woodbridge Board of Finance from 2001 to 2002 and subsequently appointed to fill a vacancy on the Amity Board of Education where he served as one of three members of the Amity Special Review Committee (2002-2003).

Editor’s Note: Letters reflect the perspectives of their authors. They are published to foster dialogue about issues of local concern, including questions of governance, transparency, and accountability, as well as topics such as highlighting upcoming or past events from community groups. To submit a letter for consideration please refer to the submission guidelines.