The Newburgh Advocate

At the special Bond Resolution Work Session held Monday night, Councilwoman Christine Bello announced that she and Assemblyman Tom Kirwan have called for a State investigation by the NY Comptroller’s office into the proposed $6.325M Bond.

According to Kirwan’s letter to the Comptroller,

…A new bond is being proposed for an additional $6,325,000 to cover additional costs – over $2,000,000 of which is for removal of newly discovered asbestos. Two of the principals from whom the city bought the building are the owners of the engineering firm which handles all of the city’s engineering problems.

One of the questions that Ms. Bello has is why didn’t the engineers know about the existing asbestos, and if they did know, why was this sprung on the City after the sale? The State of New York has an interest in this because we have agreed to pay one-third of all interest payments. As the cost goes up, so does the cost to the state. Another question from Ms. Bello is why isn’t the city suing the engineers who, in addition to making money on the sale of the building, now stand to make even more money as the result of either their ineptitude or deliberate misrepresentation on the presence of the asbestos.

At the work session meeting, when Councilwoman Bello made her announcement the attending audience broke into applause:

The session began with a lengthy chronology of Den Cass, the partnership that owned Broadway School, by Economic Development Director Bob McKenna. Councilwoman Marge Bell followed with a Den Cass chronology of her own culled from newspaper clippings which she read and was both corrected and corroborated by McKenna (see here for a third chronology of Den Cass, here for a representation on asbestos by Hauser, and here for its Certificate of Formation.)

Councilwoman Bell argued that the city should end its relationship with the current consulting engineer Hauser and hire an in-house engineer: