Behavior not helping voters examine issues

During the City Council meeting on Oct. 17, Pat Kane, the vice chair of the Charter Review Commission, called Commissioner Skip Scirocco and left a message on his phone. The only way to grasp the full ugliness of this message is to endure listening to it. The audio is available on the Saratogian website as part of a story on the incident by Joseph Phelan. Mr. Kane taunts Commissioner Scirocco in a stream of abuse which includes calling him “chicken s--.”

What I found stunning was that when questioned by the Saratogian reporter, Mr. Kane was completely unapologetic. Kane basically said that given Commissioner Scirocco’s opposition to charter change he, Kane, had every right to behave as he did.

Just as revealing was Commission Chair Robert Turner’s response to the Saratogian. Asked to address Mr. Kane’s call, rather than express disapproval, Mr. Turner simply ignored the question and launched into a recitation of the commission’s talking points. Ethics? As our current president would probably observe, ethics are for losers.

Mr. Turner is a professor of political science at Skidmore College. His tactic here is representative of the current state of what passes for politics in our country. The “pros” would advise doing exactly what he did which was don’t allow anything to take you off message.

While this incident is especially egregious, it is not an anomaly in the Charter Commission campaign. I write a blog on city politics and I have cited an ongoing pattern of the Charter Commission releasing statements that are either untrue or extremely deceptive.

As just one example, Jeff Altamari, who authored the commission’s statement on the financial impact of the proposed charter wrote a Reader’s View for the Saratogian in which he defended his numbers by boasting that the Commission did “in-depth” research on 13 cities in five states to come up with the $381,000 savings to the city. I FOILed the commission requesting any materials related to his alleged research. I received a copy of an agenda and the minutes of a meeting which included a one sentence reference to having looked at other cities. If there was thorough research done, where is it?

Whether you support or oppose charter change, this kind of campaigning does not help to facilitate an honest examination of the issues. John Kaufmann Saratoga Springs