URGENT funds on hold

Ulster comptroller won’t OK distribution

KINGSTON — Ulster County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach said Monday the distribution of about $200,000 seized by the Ulster Regional Gang Enforcement Narcotics Team among participating municipalities may have to be decided in court if the parties cannot agree on how to split up the cash.

Auerbach said he will not allow Ulster County to release from its bank account money seized by URGENT without a formal agreement between municipalities about how to distribute the money.

The old agreement under which the task force has been operating since 2007 was never approved by governing legislative bodies like town governments and the county Legislature, the Comptroller’s Office said in a report released Monday.

Forty-five percent of seized money was supposed to be distributed equally among participating agencies, according to the report, but that didn’t happen and neither did other agreed-upon accounting requirements.

“There are many other

obstacles to a true accounting of the URGENT program, as you’ll note in the report,” said Auerbach at a press briefing. “The problem here is not with the law enforcement, it’s with the finances and the record-keeping. These agencies should be enforcing the law, not drafting contracts and administering hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

COUNTY Sheriff Paul Van Blarcum said Monday he had just received the report and wanted to fully read it before he comments. He has previously been critical of Auberbach’s intervention, saying in part that he has never encountered an issue police could not resolve for themselves.

Deputy Comptroller Joseph Eriole said informally “chopping up hundreds of thousands of dollars” is not an appropriate way to do business, and “this important program is on a tightrope with no net.”

The report said a new agreement, which the county Legislature was initially going to consider last month until it was tabled, also had serious flaws like excluding the city of Kingston, which left URGENT. City officials now want Kingston’s share of asset forfeitures, and Eriole said the new proposed agreement would not resolve the problem of how to divide the money.

RONALD CLUM, county director of internal audit and control, noted the report lays out several payback scenarios in which Kingston gets between nothing and $50,000 worth of reimbursements. Kingston Mayor Shayne Gallo said he is open to different solutions as long as the city is fairly compensated for its part in URGENT.

All along, municipalities were supposed to be getting their cuts of seized cash, but the report said there has been informal agreement to reinvest in URGENT. It was difficult to detail how that money was spent because of poor record-keeping, Eriole said, but it was generally used to pay for expenses like equipment and informants.

AUERBACH said it is possible the poor accounting could have enabled former Kingston police Detective Lt. Timothy Matthews to steal money from URGENT and the county.

In pleading guilty in Janaury to two felony counts of grand larceny, Matthews admitted stealing more than $50,000 from the city (for which he headed the city police department’s Detective Division) between Jan. 1, 2001, and Feb. 3, 2011; and more than $50,000 from the county (for which he headed URGENT) between March 1, 2007, and Dec. 31, 2010, the District Attorney’s Office said at the time. Matthews was sentenced to 3 to 9 years in prison and ordered to pay $212,000 in restitution.

Auerbach acknowledged that litigating over the distribution of the $200,000 in URGENT funds would be expensive and complex, and said that while an agreement is likely, until the underlying problems with the agreement are resolved, litigation remains a possibility.

kwind@freemanonline. com; twitter.com/KyleatFreeman