I met Frank Farricker at Democratic first selectman Lin Lavery's rally at Armstrong Court in Greenwich on Saturday and asked him more questions about Republican First Selectman Peter Tesei's handling of Greenwich's stimulus request. Frank shed more light on Tesei's abysmal handling of the request, which resulted in the town's being awarded just $4 million, a fraction of what other municipalities received.
I asked Frank Farricker why he was invited by Tesei to that last-minute Christmas Eve 2008 meeting on the stimulus, when Frank isn't a selectman or in line to participate. Farricker, a former candidate for first selectman in 2007, serves on the town's Planning & Zoning Committee. In fact, according to Farricker, it was he and not Tesei who called that meeting. Farricker had received data from a friend in state government about requests from other towns and Farricker was appalled that Greenwich was missing out on a lot of potential federal funds. He called Tesei and urged him to submit a bigger request. According to Farricker, Tesei had asked the head of the town's public works department to put in a request, and it came to less than $4 million. In contrast, Bridgeport's mayor Bill Finch requested over a billion dollars from the bill, and had already submitted his full detailed request.
According to Farricker, Tesei finally relented and agreed to a meeting, provided that Farricker could get Congressman Jim Himes to attend. Farricker made the call to Himes, who reportedly was surprised to be summoned to a meeting with Tesei by Farricker. The morning of the meeting, Farricker called Democratic selectman Lin Lavery to make sure she was coming to the meeting at 11am. Her response to Farricker: "What meeting?" Tesei hadn't bothered to invite her. It was Frank Farricker who brought her into that critical December 24 meeting, not Tesei. So much for bi-partisanship. It also shows that Mr. Tesei was being disingenuous when he was quoted by Greenwich Time as saying, "If Lin was so interested (in the stimulus request and the earmark), then why didn't she raise this at the time and volunteer to help?" The answer appears to be that he had deliberately kept her in the dark.
In the meeting that was attended by the town's various department heads, invited at Farricker's urging, Frank Farricker repeatedly urged them to forget the requirement that the projects be "shovel-ready", and to submit projects that were more embryonic. Just two weeks before, the town had suffered a major rupture in a main sewer pipe that resulted in 28 million gallons of untreated effluent being flushed into the Mianus River and on into Long Island Sound, a major spill. Farricker urged Tesei to include funding for new sewage pipes to replace that ruptured main that had reached the end of its projected life. Lin Lavery also participated and urged the town to submit more funding requests.
Finally, as a result of Frank Farricker's initiative and Lin Lavery's participation, Peter Tesei was forced to dramatically increase the town's stimulus request by some 25X from his initial amount. Had Tesei then followed up by lobbying Connecticut's congressional delegation for the projects and coordinated strategy in Washington as did other municipal executives, the town might have been much more successful in winning federal funding. But Tesei's involvement in the stimulus request seems to have ended right there in Town Hall on Christmas Eve. He made no effort to lobby Congress or fight for Greenwich's requests.
In short, he blew it big time. So it is remarkable that Tesei is now claiming credit for submitting $84 million in funding requests in the first place, and defending his subsequent inaction by saying he didn't want to take a junket to Washington.
So when Peter Tesei is quoted as saying that "Lin's accusations are blatant lies, and it illustrates her lack of understanding on how our government works," it seems that it's Tesei who's being disingenuous. Certainly in the case of the federal stimulus request, it was clearly Mr. Tesei who "lacks understanding on how our government works."
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