To the editor:

Recently, I was pretty astonished to read that Essex County has spent somewhere north of $20,000 over litigation over disclosure of voting records. It’s pretty clear that a pattern is coming to light were local government makes a bank shot (footnote 1) into its insurance to fund what is either a grudge match or just plain bad governance. I enclose a bundle of papers from the ongoing stolen car matter that is pending in Essex County Supreme Court. It’s bad enough that there is no longer any sitting justice in Essex County despite the fact that the county is almost larger (2) than the state of Delaware, but it seems that the justice assigned to our cases excel in what I would call “fuzzy logic.” I have a matter where several local towns (3) failed to follow the New York Vehicle and Traffic Law Section 1224 over cars that made their way to the George Moore junkyard in Keeseville.

For example, Westport’s Albany lawyers filed about 100 pages in the form of affidavits based upon demands of discovery for me to produce records that the town holds. The town more or less stated that it could not find anything going back 10 years, and hence I would be more or less out of time. Since it seems that the practice of lawyers not to provide an extra copy for the county clerk’s files, that you either have to track down an envelope in the mail or learn about things too late. I would guess that the legal fees are well above $11,000 just so the town wouldn’t have to pay for a 26-year-old Volvo. Since this seems to come out of insurance or is instigated in executive (closed) sessions, it’s pretty clear that the concept of good faith is nonexistent.

I thank you in advance,

William Kuntz III

Elizabethtown

Footnotes:

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bank%20shot

2. State of Delaware 1,981-vs-Essex County, NY 1,916

3. Westport, Essex and AuSable