Former North Hempstead Town Supervisor Jon Kaiman said last Friday that the 25-year-old requirement of town political party leaders to file financial disclosure forms was at one point determined to be unenforceable.
Gerard Terry, the former chairman of the North Hempstead Democratic Committee who was revealed in January to have amassed $1.4 million in state and federal tax debts, was never required to file financial disclosure reports because the town Board of Ethics previously determined it lacked the authority to collect them from the heads of town political committees, Kaiman said in a sit-down interview with Blank Slate Media.
“There was a code that said he was. There was a determination that said he wasn’t,” said Kaiman, a Democrat running to replace U.S. Rep. Steve Israel in the North Shore’s Third Congressional District. “There was a practice that never, kind of, materialized.”
Before his administration began in 2004, the ethics board ruled that the requirement adopted as part of the town’s Code of Ethics in 1990 — the only such rule among Nassau County’s three townships — was “not enforceable,” he said.
“When I came to be town supervisor there was no culture of doing it, so I was not aware of it,” Kaiman said. “It was just simply not there.”
Current Town Supervisor Judi Bosworth, who succeeded Kaiman in 2013, directed Town Attorney Elizabeth Botwin to enforce the rule last month in the wake of a Newsday report on the tax debt Terry accumulated while holding six government jobs that earned him more than $200,000 a year.
Terry served as chairman of the North Hempstead Democratic Committee from 2007 until February, when he stepped down the same day Bosworth called for his resignation.
In response to questions about past ethics board rulings on the rule for party leaders, town spokeswoman Carole Trottere said: “The supervisor has directed the town attorney to enforce this provision of our ethics code.”
The town’s financial disclosure form requires filers to report any debts worth $5,000 or more that they, their spouses or their children owe.
The ethics board is currently investigating Terry’s wife Concetta, a deputy town clerk, because she did not list Gerard’s tax debts on financial disclosure forms dating back to 2006.
A state law required municipalities to adopt an ethics code by January 1, 1991.
Another statute in New York’s General Municipal Law names several specific officials who should file financial disclosure statements, but leaders of town political committees are not among them.
“This is not required anywhere except for certain pockets of communities that have decided they wanted to add it to their legislation, so there’s no state law,” said Kaiman, who was a Nassau County District Court judge for three years before becoming town supervisor. “This is strictly a local ordinance.”
Countywide political committee leaders are required to file financial disclosures with the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics.
Brookhaven Town Republican Committee Thomas Neppell sued the Suffolk County Ethics Commission in 2001 after it tried to force him to file the form, arguing the county did not have the authority to require town leaders to make the filings in its administrative code.
The Second Department of the Appellate Division disagreed, ruling in 2003 that the general municipal law did not intend to “occupy the field of financial disclosure to the exclusion of local law.”
“Ultimately there is some legal precedent now that suggests a town does have a power to do that,” Kaiman said.
North Hempstead recently broadened the field of people required to make financial disclosures, adding contractors, family members of town employees and other additional officials.
Gerard Terry had an annual contract worth almost $74,000 as the attorney for the town’s zoning board and as special counsel to the town attorney’s office.
The contract expired at the end of 2015 and was not renewed this year.
