Did Glen Casey's wife rack up 51 no-fine tickets? It's a reasonable question.
According to the state comptroller's report, a vehicle registered to a Leah W. Casey received 51 no-fine tickets between 2001 and 2008. Councilman Casey is married to a Leah Walker Casey, an Albany lawyer. Is this the same Leah W. Casey?
I called Mr. Casey this morning and asked him if he would like to comment about what appears to be his wife's 51 no-fine tickets. He said that he was in a meeting and that he would have to call me back. I gave him my phone number. After not hearing from him for three hours, I called him back and left a voice-mail message.
I am still waiting to hear from the councilman.
A representative with the state comptroller's office, William Reynolds, told me that the office cannot provide any information other than what was already made available in the report.
While we wait for an answer to this great mystery:
Remember when the Times Union made a big deal about Councilman and mayoral candidate Corey Ellis receiving 19 no-fine tickets? First, by publishing a news piece outlining the councilman's already admitted receipt of no-fine tickets and then by following that with a hit-job editorial that masked its real aim (to damage Ellis) behind a bunch of crazy rambling? Of course you do.
. . . It's time to reiterate one of the report's critical conclusions: No more free passes. That means no more bull's-eye decals, no more VIP lists and no more city-sanctioned placards.
One form of no-fine tickets is as ripe for abuse as the others. It's odd, then, to hear Common Council Member Corey Ellis drawing such a distinction among them.
Is it really odd to draw a distinction between the leniency showed a cop going to court or a councilman going to a committee meeting, which is surely legitimate, from the abuse that allowed the director of the downtown BID to accumulate 736 no-fine tickets? No, of course it isn't.
As Ellis pointed out at a campaign stop Monday night, the reason he pushed so hard for an investigation had nothing to do with halting a reasonable allowance for city officials; it was an effort to bring to light the extent to which an unregulated system was being abused and to impose parameters upon it.
"I used the placard where I thought it was appropriate to be used," Ellis said, "and now we do an investigation and they say the placard is only supposed to be used in certain places. My answer to that is, 'Show me that in writing.' There's no policy. There has never been a policy."
Perhaps Ellis should have made more of an effort before the investigation to understand the limits of his parking privileges. After all, Dominick Calsolaro and Shawn Morris weren't on the comptroller's list of no-fine recipients. But Ellis was far from alone in receiving no-fine tickets while using his city-issued placard--Casey received 14 of them, Barbara Smith received one, among others.
What is clear is that the problem was not with the stickers or placards or lists, or whatever method is used to implement parking privilege. The problem was in the oversight of the no-fine system. The problem was in the fact that a councilman had no clearly defined parameters for using his privilege, nor any real incentive to discover if those parameters even existed. No one, it seems, had reason to think twice before taking full advantage.
What is odd is that the TU's editorial board decided to twist around the outcome of the comptroller's investigation so that they could blast Ellis. Especially when it is so obvious where they ought to have assigned blame: the man who has been running of this city for the past 16 years, Mayor Jerry Jennings.
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