Letters

Truth be told, these guys are shameless. Foremost, Ralph Fasano tantrumming about “deficient reporting and bias” [“Biased Reporting,” Letters, January 26].

In 2018, on the first leg of his development tour, he crowed that people were won over when they saw what he built and the lovely populace it served. Absent from his utopian scenario was the question of why those people had to be won over in the first place. He wasn’t about to delve into that.

And who was the lady official referred to in his letter who invited him to Southampton “to consider the site” (on County Road 39!)? Was it she who gushed about affordable workforce housing, and traffic alleviation, until she departed? To this lady, Mr. Fasano says, he “made it clear what Concern does and could do at this location.”

Surely this pair then conveyed this information to the supervisor, Town Board, Planning Board and the public? Or did it “change,” as Jay Schneiderman maintains, while he was still schmoozing about local workforce housing?

The public was not told. We had to uncover it. Simple, clear answers to repeated questions about eligibility were hard to pry out of the town’s intentional confusion and bureaucratic fog.

Fasano decries “deficient reporting” but never addressed dropping “Independent Living” from Concern for Independent Living. Was it because the public questioned what that implied?

Also: Now you see it, now you don’t — why was “persons with psychiatric disabilities” deleted from the description of Concern’s New York State Office of Mental Health mandates on his IRS 990 form? It’s all a matter of public record, but Schneiderman and his cheerleading board and “planners” opted to ignore it and to call it what it was clearly never was: local, affordable housing. But lies and misrepresentation in retrospect are okay, because it’s for veterans.

Shamelessness barely covers self-flack Michael Daly, who, irrelevant as always, thrusts himself into view. Any exposure of duplicity, or opposition, or expressed concerns about traffic, sustainability, density, crime or available services are pivoted by sententious bluster and recriminations to sanctimoniousness, with his ancestors thrown in for ballast.

The last time he exhumed his relatives was to accuse someone opposing Liberty Gardens of disseminating lies and of being prejudiced toward him in the manner exerted on his immigrant relatives as shown by Daniel Day-Lewis in “Gangs of New York.” (Wha?)

A YIMBY proselytizer, he lumbers from maxims and decrees about affordable housing to ad hominem invective. From YIMBY-ism to YIYBY-ism: “Yes, In YOUR backyard.”

These guys and their gone gal said anything to sugarcoat the obvious truth, touting Liberty Gardens as local, affordable workforce housing when they knew it was something very different, with considerable consequences for the community.

Shame on all of them.

Frances Genovese

Southampton