This blog is not affiliated or endorsed, by Nassau OTB, a public benefit corporation, subject to the New York Freedom
of Information Law, NY Pub Off Law Sec 84 et seq.
Specialists go undercover for Joseph g Cairo as he moves by eminent domain to make Nassau oTB landlord flatter than a ukranian automobile under a Russian tank using the Kathy Hochul law firm for cleanliness
The new Bills stadium will look and feel a lot different from the current 50-year-old facility including less seating capacity and more comfort; multiple levels and concourses; stadium orientation shift of 25 degrees; more dynamic entrances; and a clear path to the stadium. Phillips Lytle has been retained to oversee the environmental review process.
The FanDuel Meet at Kentucky Downs runs Sept. 1, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11 and 14, the most dates since the track also ran seven in 2003. Post time for the first race is 12:25 p.m. Central (1:25 p.m. Eastern) every day except for the 11:30 a.m. CT/12:30 p.m. ET start for the Saturday Sept. 10's showcase card.
Under Janus, government workers don’t have to join or pay. But behind closed doors it’s hard to say no.
By
Tim Hoefer
An art teacher leads a lesson in her classroom in New York, Jan. 5.
PHOTO: MICHAEL LOCCISANO/GETTY IMAGES
Administrators of school districts and public universities across the country will soon welcome thousands of new teachers and professors to orientation sessions. And then those administrators will have to leave the room so unions can recruit new members.
The onboarding process has become a key battleground for the country’s government unions. For decades, labor could count on collecting hundreds of millions of dollars annually from public employees from the moment they were hired. Even workers who didn’t want to join had to pay special fees akin to union dues. That changed in 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. Afscme that these involuntary payments violated the First Amendment.
With the unions suddenly having to make the case for paying dues, access to new hires became crucial. Some unions had already worked out deals to let their recruiters speak at orientation sessions, but plenty hadn’t. Sympathetic politicians responded by giving unions new privileges to help pressure workers into joining. Lawmakers in New York provided unions “mandatory access” to orientations sessions, something management could previously deny. Other states passed similar measures. Central California’s Mariposa County made attendance for the union pitch mandatory.
Unions are now taking things a step further: getting public employers to agree to let them speak to new hires without anyone from management present. The New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest public school system, has held official orientation events for new teachers at United Federation of Teachers headquarters since 2015. But in 2018 the city agreed to let the union address new hires attending mandatory orientation “without any agent of the DOE present.”
Local governments in California and Connecticut have given unions the power to kick managers out of the room while they talk to new employees. In Connecticut, where government unions helped Gov. Ned Lamont to a narrow election victory in 2018, new state employee contracts state that “management shall not be present during the Union’s orientation.”
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California school districts have added language to their contracts to bar supervisors, district officials, and other nonteachers from witnessing the teachers union’s pitch. The practice may have spread beyond the Golden State, since public employers sometimes consent to union demands without updating contract language. As one California union official put it, he and his colleagues wanted to be free from the “chilling presence of university administrators” during their hourlong pitch.
State laws, which control collective bargaining in state and local governments, are supposed to shield public workers from coercion with regard to union membership. That protection all but vanishes when management leaves the room. New York state’s largest municipal employee union, the Civil Service Employees Association, offers new hires an application for a “no cost” $10,000 accidental death benefit. The fine print reveals the signer is in fact joining the union and agreeing to pay dues that can top $850 a year. In 2019 the president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association in New York made new sanitation workers an offer they probably found difficult to refuse. “Of the 917 workers who came before you, every single one of them joined the union,” he said. “Every single one.”
The rules around public collective bargaining are murky enough that unions don’t have to do much to make new employees believe that joining is essentially mandatory. Many public employers let the union act as an administrator for dental and vision benefits, which some employees assume they can only access if they pay dues. In recent years, the largest government-worker unions have changed their membership cards to lock new employees into a relationship for a full year.
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Elected officials are often indifferent about these tactics, since the unions’ recruitment success doesn’t have an immediate effect on government balance sheets. But with unions stepping up their efforts—and forcing employers out of the room—doing right by public employees requires making sure they know their rights. Managers should exercise their own speech rights—before and after the union pitch—to make sure employees understand that they don’t have to join a union to keep their jobs.
Four years after Janus, plenty of government employers haven’t explained to workers that union membership is not a condition of employment. Some employee handbooks still say workers must pay the union to keep their jobs. And many—if not most—public employees don’t know that a contract negotiated by the union applies to them whether they pay dues or not.
Government-worker unions enjoy outsize influence over government. Governors, mayors, county executives and school superintendents facing demands for private access to their employees must remember how the unions wound up with the privileges that make them so powerful. Every one was given to them.
Mr. Hoefer is president and CEO of the Empire Center for Public Policy.
Jul 20, 2022 — Erie County comptroller's inquiry focuses on the development and purchase of a hotel at Batavia Downs, plus perks for OTB board members.
Erie County comptroller’s inquiry focuses on the development and purchase of a hotel at Batavia Downs, plus costly health insurance perks for board members
For the first time, one of the governments that owns the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp. is demanding answers about the agency’s management practices and business dealings.
Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick sent two letters this week to Henry Wojtaszek, OTB’s president and CEO. One letter posed a series of questions about the agency’s practice of providing top-shelf health insurance to board members, despite repeated warnings that doing so is impermissible.
Hardwick’s other letter raised questions about OTB’s sale of land to a group of prominent Buffalo-area businessmenfor the development of a hotel — which the agency then bought at a substantial profit to the developers.
Formed as a public benefit corporation in 1973, OTB operates 12 branches, 26 E-Z Bet locations, a telephone wagering service and a harness racing track and casino in Batavia. Revenues generated by OTB are distributed to 15 Western New York counties and the cities of Buffalo and Rochester.
The hotel deal dates back to 2015, according to Hardwick’s investigation of the transaction. In March of that year, OTB’s board of directors approved the sale of a little under an acre of land at Batavia Downs to a company called ADK Hospitality, LLC.
ADK Hospitality was formed just the month before, according to state records. The company’s partners include prominent local businessmen: Anthony J. Baynes, a former chair of the Erie County Fiscal Stability Authority; Kent Frey of Frey Electric Construction; David McNamara, a partner at the Phillips Lytle law firm; Dr. Laszlo Mechtler of the Dent Neurological Institute and Roswell Park Cancer Institute; and James and John Basil, who own car dealerships.
Baynes and Frey are big political donors, particularly to Republicans, as is McNamara’s law firm, according to state campaign finance records. Wojtaszek is a former chair of the Niagara County Republican Committeeand remains active in GOP circles.
None of the company’s partners had experience building or managing a hotel, Hardwick noted in his letter to Wojtaszek.
Nonetheless, the land was sold, ground was broken in October 2015 and the 84-room hotel opened a year later. Media reports indicate it cost $5.5 million to build. The cost was subsidized by $600,000 in tax incentives fromthe Genesee County Economic Development Center, according to a Buffalo News report.
In 2019, a year before COVID shutdowns began, OTB began working on a deal to purchase the hotel from ADK Hospitality. Those negotiations were delayed by the pandemic, according to the Business First report.
The sale finally was consummated last July at a price of $7.5 million — “a considerable markup,” according to Hardwick.
OTB raised the money for the purchase through a bond sale, according to board meeting minutes, which means OTB will pay interest on that $7.5 million, too.
Hardwick’s letter poses a long list of questions about the deal, including:
Why would OTB engage a group of investors who had never developed a hotel before? Who approached whom?
How was the sale price for the land determined? Who initiated the deal to purchase the hotel? And who set the price?
Did the New York State Gaming Commission, which oversees OTB, approve of the purchase of the hotel?
What property tax and sales tax breaks has ADK Hospitality received from local governments and development agencies?
How much has OTB spent on rooms in the hotel, before and after it took ownership, and how were those rooms used?
How much does OTB pay the company that manages the hotel?
How much has OTB paid attorneys and bond counsel to complete the purchase?
“As the chief auditor for Erie County government, which is a co-owner of WROTB, I believe it is appropriate for me to make these inquiries, to pose these questions, and to expect thorough answers,” Hardwick wrote.
Hardwick’s other letter, regarding the practice of providing premium healthcare coverage to Western Regional OTB board directors at taxpayer expense, raises questions Investigative Post has been asking (and answering) in coverage of the agency over the past four years.
The state attorney general, the state comptroller and OTB’s own attorneys have advised Wojtaszek and the board that it is illegal to extend that perk to its board members. But Wojtaszek and the board ignored those admonitions entirely until last June, when the board agreed it would no longer offer the health insurance package to new board appointees.
Hardwick had questions about that decision, too.
“If you are terminating health insurance for new directors, are you terminating it for existing directors?” he wrote.
“For current directors, when they separate from the WROTB board, will they be eligible for health insurance in retirement? Are they continuing to receive it now? Under what legal basis are you giving them lifetime health insurance after ten years?”
Hardwick went on to ask how much money the board has spent on lawyers and consultants to defend its provision of healthcare for directors. He also asked questions about per diem travel expenses and stipends for board directors.
“The questions speak for themselves,” Hardwick told Investigative Post Tuesday in a phone interview, referring to both letters.
In 2019, OTB divided $3.6 million in profits among the 17 governments that own the agency, using a formula based on population. Erie County, as the most populous of the government owners, received the biggest share: $860,687.
“As chief financial officer for the county, which is part owner of the Western Regional OTB, we’d love to maximize our revenues there. And we want to make sure that they are doing everything they can in their power to maximize profits, and thus the distributions to member municipalities such as Erie County.”
Ryan Hasenauer, a spokesman for OTB, said Wednesday afternoon the agency had not received Hardwick’s letters, so he could not comment on them.
An email to McNamara, the Phillips Lytle attorney who is a partner in ADK Hospitality, has gone unanswered. Frey, another partner, also did not answer an email seeking a response to the comptroller’s inquiry.
Gangster who cares not that Nassau oTB cannot pick and choose one Easter Sunday over the other
He was probably not around when Freeport marine was in business not far from Freeport raceway or Ray it’s glass
His racist descriptive language belittle the importance of parks and open space while igniting the Kevin McCaffrey antics of the teamster warehouse coming to Medford
Stop scratching on holidays Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays. New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state. “You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?” Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday. “I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.” OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running. One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
