We knew it was coming sooner or later. It was just a matter of when Dutchess County Legislature Chairman Roger Higgins (D-New Hamburg) would reach the end of his rope – and on Tuesday, March 25, he did. Firing off a scathing press release to back up his action, Higgins, who had allowed nearly two months to elapse since the Democratic-controlled legislature’s January decision gave him the go-ahead, slapped County Executive William Steinhaus with an Article 78 lawsuit over his imposition of a countywide governmental hiring freeze at the beginning of the fiscal year 2008. Higgins termed Steinhaus’s hiring freeze vis-à-vis the legislature: “illegal, arbitrary and capricious.”
The freeze, which Democrats maintain was politically motivated to prevent their new majority from filling key legislative positions with their own people, initially kept Higgins and company from hiring anyone at all, including a clerk and deputy clerk of the legislature to send out agendas, take down meeting notes and perform all the other administrative duties for the 25-member body. Steinhaus partially relented in February (under protest, in an equally scathing memo attacking Democratic lawmakers for, he said, turning his attempts to keep the county solvent during an economic crisis into a political football), allowing the hiring of Clerk of the Legislature Barbara Hugo and Deputy Clerk Jon Gautier to replace the Republicans former clerk, Patricia Hohmann, and her deputy, Carolyn Morris. He also subsequently didn’t prevent them from hiring Democrat David Sears as legislative counsel at a reduced rate of $35,606.
Alone in the legislative office with Judy Spahnke, a stenographer who stayed on after the Democrats took over, Hugo and Gautier have said the office is running at about half-staff, and that they’re too overwhelmed with other duties to update the legislature’s information on the county Web site for now. Highest on Higgins’s hiring wish list is his still officially jobless assistant, Fred Knapp, who is a party in the Article 78 lawsuit as well.
The issue on which the controversy surrounding the hiring freeze hangs, as well as the outcome of the lawsuit, comes down to whose interpretation of the Dutchess County Charter is to be believed. Steinhaus insists that the charter gives the executive the authority to control expenses in all units of county government, and defines the legislature itself as a unit of government. He has characterized Democratic legislators’ opposition to his right to impose the freeze as “selective partisanship.” In filing the lawsuit, Higgins continued to maintain that “the hiring freeze applied to the county legislature by the county executive is not only illegal but has been applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner,” and that Steinhaus “has failed or refused to acknowledge the charter-provided powers and privileges of the county legislature.”
Charging that Steinhaus ignores the charter’s provision for a balance of power between the executive and legislative branches, Higgins will be trying to get a state Supreme Court justice in Dutchess County to agree that the county executive “has no legal authority over the Legislative budget,” lift the freeze with regard to the legislature, and make Steinhaus put Knapp on the payroll.
No date has been set for in state Supreme Court.