DePinto files Retirement Board ethics complaint
Published on July 19th, 2006
STONEHAM, MA - Selectman John DePinto called upon the State Ethics’ Commission to investigate whether Retirement Board member Elsie Wallace illegally endorsed a pay-raise for a co-worker who threw a party for her last month.
In a letter issued on official Town of Stoneham letterhead on July 7, DePinto accused Wallace of violating the state’s conflict-of-interest laws by casting a tie-breaking vote last June to award her former office assistant a three-percent retroactive raise.
“Barbara-Jo Belliveau, her assistant, ran a retirement party on June 15, 2006 at the Montvale Plaza...for Elsie Wallace, her immediate supervisor,” DePinto’s letter to the commission reads. “One June 27, twelve-days after Barbara-Jo ran [the] retirement party, the Retirement Board voted 3-2 to give Barbara-Jo a three percent raise.”
“Elsie Wallace, in her capacity as a Retirement Board member, voted for the raise, which was the deciding vote. Without her vote, Barbara-Jo would not have been given the raise,” the Selectman further charges.
Last December, Wallace ran for the Retirement Board and was successfully elevated to the position, despite the fact that she was also employed by the town as the Retirement Administrator.
Since that time, the rookie board member’s office assistant, Belliveau, was selected by the Retirement Board to replace her supervisor once Wallace formally stepped down from the position this July.
During the June 27 meeting, the Retirement Board convened an executive session to discuss whether it was appropriate to approve retroactive raises for both Belliveau and Wallace — who was still serving in a second capacity as Retirement Administrator.
While the former Retirement office assistant left the room during the closed-door talks, Wallace remained.
Later convening in open session, a motion to approve a three-percent raise for the veteran retirement system administrator was rejected. Although Wallace originally attempted to vote in favor of her own raise, Retirement Board Chair Janice Houghton reminded her that she could not act on the matter — which was ultimately defeated.
Although Wallace could not be reached for comment on the Ethic’s Commission complaint as of presstime, the Town Hall veteran denied just after the June 27 meeting that any impropriety had taken place.
Specifically, the recently elected Retirement Board member claimed that the executive session deliberations didn’t specifically revolve around either her or Belliveau’s positions, but rather larger salary issues.
“We didn’t get into discussions about a person. We were just discussing [larger] salary issues. So we were talking about other issues related to that, but not particularly these two positions,” the recent retiree insisted.
“If that was discussed, I wouldn’t say anything. In that case, I’d be acting as the administrator, not as a Retirement Board member,” Wallace furthered, referring to what she would have done had her particular position been discussed during executive session.
During a recent Board of Selectmen meeting, DePinto and Chair Bob Sweeney accused the Retirement Board member of violating the conflict-of-interest law, and sought advise from Town Counsel William Solomon on whether it was appropriate to file a complaint with the state authority.
“If they did in fact get this ethics’ brochure and sign it, apparently they didn’t read it,” Sweeney commented at one point.
The Stoneham attorney, who refused to comment on whether an actual impropriety had taken place in his opinion, argued that the matter would be better handled through an individual complaint, and not through the Board of Selectmen as a group.
During their meeting earlier this month, Selectmen Paul Rotondi urged his counterparts to abandon any efforts to turn in a fellow town official to any state authority.
Rotondi, who was specifically addressing a Selectmen effort to turn the Retirement Board into the District Attorney’s office for an alleged open-meeting violation, argued that both groups needed to quell growing hostilities that have existed ever since the Selectmen backed a Town Meeting measure that aimed at dissolving the local Retirement Board by turning the system over to the state.
“It sound like we’re having this vendetta with the two boards fighting. We have some differences of opinion about how they should operate, but I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere [by referring them to the authorities],” the rookie Selectman argued.
However, according to DePinto, the Retirement Board has shown a continual lack of knowledge about how to legally operate their meetings, and need to take steps to address those problems.
Referring to his failed attempts to get the group to agree to meet with the District Attorney’s office for a course on the open-meeting law, the Selectman believes that he has little recourse.
“I thought this was something that shouldn’t be done, although I’m not in charge of the Ethic’s Commission,” DePinto said this week. “For too long, no one has been looking into what they’re doing. And you know what, it’s about time that somebody did.”
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