{"id":1709,"date":"2011-11-01T16:21:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T20:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/?p=1709"},"modified":"2011-11-01T16:21:43","modified_gmt":"2011-11-01T20:21:43","slug":"letter-kennett-has-crisis-of-credibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/?p=1709","title":{"rendered":"Letter: Kennett has crisis of credibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the Editor:<\/strong>
\n\"\"<\/a>I must disagree with former Supervisor Charles Shoemaker who recently asserted that \u201c[t]here is no crisis in Kennett Township.\u201d I assert that there is a critical crisis of credibility, performance, transparency and integrity, by the current Supervisors. While it is true that I have been provided some of the documentation that I requested, the guts of it has been denied me. It is in the individual transactions, and not the bucket accumulations, that the truth is found. I am not interested in the personal information of the employees, all of which can easily be redacted by the Township.<\/p>\n

Both the elected auditors and the allegedly professional accountant urged the Supervisors to use segregated accounts but the Supervisors continue to refuse to do this. I want to know how much money the Supervisors siphoned off to themselves under the pretext of \u201chealth care reimbursements\u201d, an act that is in clear violation of the law. At $10,000.00 a year, did it go on for more than the 4 years we know of, is it still going on, and was any of that money paid back? The Supervisors won\u2019t divulge that information.<\/p>\n

I want to know how much money has been taken in for open space use and where it is deposited. It certainly hasn\u2019t been used in the community since early 2008. Currently the Township bank coffers have 11.4 million dollars stashed away. How much of that is for open space? And why do we need to pay the highest taxes in the area when we run a surplus every year in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (one year recently, over one million dollars)? This hardly reflects \u201ca balanced budget.\u201d<\/p>\n

The elected auditors urged, in 2003, that the Supervisors use professional accountants to perform the annual audit. 97 residents petitioned the Supervisors to use professional auditors in 2007. Finally, in 2009, the Supervisors allegedly did so. The process was fatally flawed, failing to follow the State statute requirements.<\/p>\n

At the Board of Supervisors\u2019 meeting, held on Oct. 17th, Mr. Falcoff admitted that he \u201cdoesn\u2019t know what the State requires for a Township audit\u201d, and \u201cdoesn\u2019t know whether the credentials were checked.\u201d Incredibly, in reference to the audits for 2009 and 2010 produced by the allegedly professional accountant, Mr. Falcoff acknowledged that he \u201cdoesn\u2019t know why it was accepted since it was not signed.\u201d The fact is that they were not signed, the company that produced them does not exist, and the allegedly professional accountant does not exist as a registered accountant in the states of PA or DE, all of which is required by law. Everything about these two documents, and the circumstances underlying their creation, shouts out \u201csham\u201d and \u201cfraud.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Supervisors could exercise transparency by making the financial information of the Township available for viewing on its website, as do others. Rather than inform the residents, they prefer to suppress this information, at the price of $20,000.00, to date, fighting my Right-To-Know requests. And when they lost this fight over the financial database, they chose to appeal to the Courts of Common Pleas to stop the disclosure before the election on November 8th, further wasting the funds of the Township in an effort to hide their financial dealings.<\/p>\n

No, Mr. Shoemaker, I disagree with you. Kennett Township is in a momentous crisis. I call on the voters to turn out and help to correct this crisis by voting for me as Supervisor.<\/p>\n

Scudder G. Stevens<\/strong>
\nCandidate,<\/strong><\/p>\n

Township Supervisor,<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kennett Township.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the Editor: I must disagree with former Supervisor Charles Shoemaker who recently asserted that \u201c[t]here is no crisis in Kennett Township.\u201d I assert that there is a critical crisis of credibility, performance, transparency and integrity, by the current Supervisors. While it is true that I have been provided some of the documentation that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242],"tags":[38,36,248],"class_list":["post-1709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letters-to-the-editor","tag-election-2011","tag-kennett-township","tag-township-supervisor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}