Harris and Harris. The NYPSC and BP. Albany Is Such A Nice Little Cozy Place!!!

 

Here is the inside of the story that you saw today in the Watertown Daily Times (WDT) about a high level NY Public Service  Commissioner being married to BP’s lawyer representing their Cape  Vincent Wind Farm.  The same lawyer that was in Cape Vincent ( CV) last week at a BP public information event. Here is a link to the WDT article.  If you haven’t read it, read it first.

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20121212/NEWS03/712129843

Thanks to Jae Lee and his editors for recognizing the importance and going with the story.  It is huge and goes directly to the fundamentals of the CV wind battle problems.

Since I entered the wind fight in 2006 I have taken a hard line NO wind stance.  I have been trying to convince this community and its most recent leaders what the reality is of the powers they are up against and why they should not appease them but take a hard line attack against it and fight back. This is NOT about little provincial wind laws and setbacks, and health, safety and welfare.  It is a big politically rigged game.  They own the playing field, the ball, the refs, the rules and the game itself.  They could give a crap about some little town’s wind law way up in NNY.  In fact our town by participating in Art X just gave away our law for this system to arbitrate with BP.  Read on and see if you thing that was a wise idea!   

This article points up exactly the reality I have been talking about.  The system is badly rigged and we should not be participating in it nor should we appease it.  This information shows exactly why the town should seriously re-evaluate it’s approach to follow and appease Cuomo and the Art X process. 

I am going to lay out the facts as they happened over the last several days and more facts beyond this immediate connection as we go along.  I hope you will come back and keep reading. .

At the BP event last week CV Councilman Clif Schneider raised concerns with the BP lawyer John S, Harris that he and BP had unfair access to Albany policy makers that the town didn’t have.  It is unclear whether Clif knew of the Harris connection of not.  I suspect he might have and was fishing with Harris to see what he would get. The CV blog Pandora’s Box of Rocks has a video of the exchange on her blog at this link.

http://pandorasboxofrocks.blogspot.com/

About this same time she also posed a question on her blog.  To her credit she searched the name Harris and the PSC and came up with the name Maureen Harris as a commissioner.  Good work Pandy.  And also to her credit she posed the question are the Harris’ related?  

I found this very interesting and started researching it myself and found an AP article from 2008 along with other info that verified the husband wife relationship between the Harris’ as well as other stuff about them.  At that point I posted basic information and a link on K’s blog to try to attempt to help her answer her own question.  I sent her an email as well, even though we are at odds with each other.  But here is the odd part.  She removed my comment and the link that verified her question.  Go figure.  If you go back to that post you can see where someone refers to me but there in NO comment from me.  You can also see somebody posted pieces from the article link I had put on there. I did, however, post similar comments about verifying this Harris connection under Jae Lee’s original article about BP event.  You can see that at this link under comments.

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20121207/NEWS03/712079855

Well it was obvious Pandy nor Wiley at JLL were going to carry this beyond the basic question, and I felt this was absolutely critical information for our community to have.  Both blogs, especially PBR had the info and it would be no risk to them since it was all verified in previous reporting and facts and thought this was unacceptable on such critical info. I guess I don’t get it that she didn’t follow up on her question when the research was fairly simple and verified.  But thanks to K anyhow for at least opening that door. That was important and I won’t take away credit for what she did.

So light of these events I  decide to  re-opened this blog and posted what I had.  I thought this would be important for a media source to report it.  So I sent what I had to several media outlets including the WDT.  The WDT contact me and indicated they were going to run with it.  I had no real influence there.  If they didn’t think it was important they would not have run it.  My hat is off to Jae Lee and his editors for getting on this and reporting absolutely critical information to the communities they serve. I hope they will push further.

So now you have the story and can judge for yourself. 

But there is more. I will have a series of posts on this matter because it is SO critical. But here is something to wet your whistle till then.

For example, you will see in the WDT article and in a previous post below of the AP article about Mrs. Harris that Mrs. Harris was being investigated by Cuomo when he was  AG for improper actions concerning receiving state benefits and she was fined $50,000.  She wasn’t the only one but Cuomo is quoted as saying he thought it was fraudulent, but never called her fraudulent. Aaahhhh….ge Andy I think you just did!  Well you wouldn’t want to call somebody you picked to work in your own office a fraud now would you!

So I looked into that.  Mrs. Harris  was a PSC commissioner at the time, and in fact she was at one time in Cuomo’s AG office as a litigator.  The lawyer who defended her was Michael Koenig, a big time lawyer whose expertise is white collar crime and cases of high profile people under govt investigations , among other things.  So I Googled him.  And gee what do ya know!  What law firm did he work for and apparently was a shareholder in?  Greenberg Taurig LLC.  Does the name Greenberg ring a bell with anybody?  It should!  And why is it important?  Greenberg was a top lawyer in AG Cuomo’s AG office in 2010 and was initially involved in the AG  investigation of our former CV town board and their conflicts of interest.  He is the guy who called me in CV about the details of this CV ethics mess. And when we met with him and others from Cuomo’s staff I started to talk about former Sen.  Aubertine’s CV wind ethics mess and all the AG guys looked at the floor and said nothing.  They knew of Aubertine’s wind mess and when Cuomo decided to investigate our former CV officials Aubertine wasn’t even mentioned or involved.  THEN, that investigation that Greenberg and Cuomo were involved in has just conveniently EVAPORATED!!!

Now it crossed my mind that when Aubertine got in his wind pickle in CV  if the lawyer Koenig was called by Greenberg and Cuomo to consult about Aubertine’s high profile wind ethics mess that all of us were exposing in CV and was laid right at Greenberg’s feet along with Cuomo’s deputy chief of staff..  You know basically the same reason Aubertine was removed from office by NNY voters.  Seems to me although I am just a hick from AZ and CV that Gov. Cuomo has a lot of his commissioners with questionable behavior.  And he has the intestinal fortitude to come to Watertown last summer and tell our communities that Art X is balanced and we have to be “reasonable.”  Well I can understand that when he looks over at CV and other NNY communities writing wind laws so we can dutifully go along with Art X and all the bullshit attached to it. Time to wake up CV town board! 

I’m  beginning to think I would like to live in Albany.  It seems like such a cozy friendly little place where everybody seems to know everybody.  How quaint!!! Kinda like the old TV show “Cheers” song,  “Where everybody knows your name…”  Oh if you only knew!!!

And think about all this the next tme somebody tries to convince you to write a letter to the NYPSC begging and pleading with them to PLEASE save CV...you gotta be kidding!!!

More to come!

PS   An initial version of this post made a unnessesary comment about Councilman Clif Schneider.  That has been removed and my apologies to Clif.  But I now hope that he and the town board clealry understands what they are up against and will consider a chnage of direction.