A deal has been reached which will permit the sale of Avalon on the Sound at 255 Huguenot Street. Under the deal , Avalon Bay Communities, the owner of the property, will pay the City of New Rochelle about $9mm, spread over several years, with $3mm coming in 2010. The City is expected to use the funds to offset future tax increases.

The transaction will be discussed at tomorrow's City Council meeting.

Developing...

Former New Rochelle Public Library Trustee and School Board candidate Frank Pasquale III, 44, was sentenced Friday to six years in prison under a plea agreement with Connecticut prosecutors stemming from his arrest in 2008 on charges of criminal attempt at second-degree sexual assault. Pasquale was taken directly from the courthouse in Waterbury, CT to begin serving his sentence.

Under terms of the deal, according to Waterbury Court Clerk William Hoey, Pasquale must serve a minimum of 9 months in prison. His sentence may be suspended after 15 months at which point he will be on probation for 10 years. Special conditions which will apply to probation including registering as a sex offender, a prohibition against unsupervised contact with children under 16 years old, no unsupervised visits with his own children without prior notice to his probation officer. Pasquale will also be required to undergo mental health treatment and undergo sex offender evaluation and treatment.

Pasquale was arrested by local police in Naugatuck, Connecticut on January 24, 2008 when he showed up for a meeting to have sex with what he believed to be a 15 year old child.

REMINDER: The 2010-11 New Rochelle School Budget will be released at 7:00 PM on Feb 11th at at the "School Budget Community Input Forum" which will be held at the New Rochelle High School library (enter the building through the teachers parking lot off of 265 Clove Road).

Don't shout at the waves. If you care, come! If you want to be heard, speak up! If you want accountability, you have to demand it!

OPEN LETTER

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Sanchez
To: Richard ORGANISCIAK; Sara Richmond; Jeffrey Hastie; Jerome Smith; David Lacher; Deirdre Polow; cindybabcock; Chrisanne Petrone; Quay Watkins; Liz Saraiva
Sent: Wed, Feb 3, 2010 7:04 pm
Subject: school budget

For your consideration - see you all next week

A beaming and exultant Archbishop Timothy Dolan was greeted with thunderous applause last night by well over 1,000 congregants of the Sound Shore Vicariate who had gathered for an Evening Prayer service at The Blessed Sacrament Church in downtown New Rochelle. Blessed Sacrament is the mother Church of the Sound Shore Vicariate which encompasses New Rochelle, Pelham, Pelham Manor and Mount Vernon.

Reflecting the diverse nature of the local Catholic community, prayers were said in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Dolan is in the final stages of meeting his commitment to visit every vicariate in the New York Archdiocese during his first year in office. He was named Archbishop of New York by Pope Benedict XVI on February 23, 2009. He was installed as Archbishop of New York on April 15, 2009.

Afterwards, almost every congregant went to the nearby school gymnasium, where the Archbishop patiently greeted and blessed each and every one. A professional photographer took photos which will be made available through the individual parishes.

The show airs at 8 pm tonight on WVOX, 1460 AM and wvox.com on your computer or on your iPhone.

The Sound Report feature NR News & Views: “New Rochelle News and Views” radio celebrates one year. here.

Call in the direct studio number is 914 636-0110.

Tonights Topics:

• City Park and the Legacy Grant. Great for the Park Good for the City?
• The Census is flawed but fill it out! New Ro Needs you.
• Tattoo Parlors - I just don't know
• How Taxes on Big Oil and the banks will affect you
• The Armory Debate: A new twist

Gregory T. Varian, Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the New Rochelle Public Library has written a scathing denunciation of the Journal News, a letter-to-the-editor published today by the paper, which accuses the JN of making false claims, failing to investigate properly, publishing a misleading story, making poorly informed assumptions and "providing no evidence for the basis of its story". Varian, a land use lawyer with offices at 270 North Avenue, delivers the coup de grace stating flatly "The Journal News headline lacked a story".

Ouch! It sounds like something I might have written. Who knew I had an ally on the NRPL Board of Trustees?

Talk of the Sound, not knowing the context provided by Mr. Varian, had previously praised the article because it was an example of the Journal News taking the trouble to obtain police records and doing real investigative reporting.

Appearing with Bob Marrone of WVOX AM 1460, Mayor Noam Bramson blamed city workers for "clerical errors" that cost the City tens of thousands of dollars in uncollected taxes. As a result, Municipal Civil Services Commission Chairman Dominic Procopio was able to pocket thousands of dollars in illicit property tax exemptions on his property at 7 Pinebrook Road going back to at least 2002. After Talk of the Sound reported Procopio's tax problems, the well-connected Procopio was allowed to keep the vast majority of the money.

Procopio received Combat Veteran Tax Exemptions for eight year despite never having served in the U.S. military, as well as STAR exemptions given to owners living in the home. Procopio lives in another home on Liberty Avenue.

Bramson got several pointed questions about a Talk of the Sound story yesterday regarding the agenda for today's City Council meeting which includes an amendment to the City Charter regarding the Appointing Authority for the Civil Service Administrator.

"Mr. Procopio has done a good job", said Bramson, when challenged on Procopio's fitness for office.

Professor Paul Murray, a sociology professor at Siena College, is working on a biography of Paul Zuber, the lead attorney for the Lincoln families in the New Rochelle case. Murray is looking to interview current and former New Rochelle residents who were involved with or impacted by the case.

Murray, a noted civil rights scholar, is a contributor to The African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Oxford University Press, 2008). He wrote a brief biography of Zuber published (with permission) below:

Zuber, Paul Burgess (20 December 1926 - 6 March 1987), lawyer and professor, was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. His parents were Paul A. Zuber, a postal worker, and Jennie Baer Zuber. He attended school in Williamsport through third grade. In 1934 his family moved to Harlem and he was enrolled in the all-black P.S. 157.

What to make up of this? The Agenda for the City Council meeting on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 includes a proposed Amendment to the Code of the City of New Rochelle regarding Appointing Authority. You won't find Bramson's name on this Agenda item but clearly his fingers are all over it. Supposedly, Omar Small of all people has recommended to Chuck Strome that "the City Manager be given authority to appointed and/or remove the Civil Service Administrator" (emphasis added). And so with this Charter change begins (hopefully) the final days of tax cheat and phony patriot Domenic Procopio as a public official...not with a bang but with an agenda item at a Committee of the Whole Meeting.

For the first time ever, the New Rochelle Board of Education has released a full copy of the Internal Auditors Report.

The highlights of the report are that the revenues so far his year are about $217.2mm and expenditures are $219.8mm. Expenditures have exceeded Revenue by $2.6mm. The fund balance was $18.3mm at the beginning of the year; it has been reduced by $2.6mm and currently stands at $15.6mm. Of the remaining $15.6mm, most of it has been designated for refunding tax certioraris ($6.1mm) and reducing the impact on raising the property tax ($3.9mm), leaving just $5.0 in undesignated funds. Under New York State law, the district can keep no more than 4% of the total budget in reserve which comes out to be roughly $9mm so the reserve is currently about half the legal limit.

We are going to circulate the report (links below) and ask readers who are interested to go through it and provide any feedback. A few of us are going to try to get together in the coming days and hope to have a more detailed analysis ready before the beginning of the upcoming budget cycle.

There is one main document and 2 smaller ones: