Dick Whines Coverage “Unfair,” Throws Tantrums

EDITORIAL: There is more to being a good leader than pushing your insincere smile into every opportunity for a public appearance or photo op, but our Dr. Dick apparently never learned the virtues of showing up for work every day, being a role model in the community, or modeling good behavior. We find it nauseating that a public official would send a whiny letter to the local paper, yet that’s just what we have here. A copy of Dr. Dick’s load of codswallop, addressed to Southern Dutchess News owners Curtis Schmidt and Al Osten has found its way to our desk, and you can just picture Dick sniveling as he complains about “unfair” coverage. You don’t BUY good coverage, Dick; you EARN it. Here’s how NOT to go about it:

• In the twelve months he’s been in office, Dr. Dick has yet to justify his full-time salary with a full week of work. (Let’s not forget that he’s still pocketing $66,000 taxpayer funded dollars a year despite his campaign promise to give back his raise after he got in office.) It’s tough to spend more than 3 or 4 days in the town while you’re also running off to Jersey to handle patent work for Duane Morris, but Dick – that’s what we’re paying you for, and you wanted this job, remember?  (Dick also spends time basking at his Tribeca penthouse – so much time there, in fact, that he has Wappinger tax bill mailed there.)
  
  Of course, he’s also had to fly to China five times this year, also at the behest of Duane Morris. The March trip alone was over two weeks. Then there was June, August, October …. Dick, when the residents elected you, they didn’t elect a part-timer. You're getting paid a big boy salary to be sitting at your big boy desk in town hall. (As icing on your greed-cake, you stuck the town with the cost of an international cell phone, so you might possibly be reachable while playing international envoy.)

• Dick also spends a lot of time making sure his shiny face graces the pages of the SDN or serving as his own biggest fan on Facebook. (You might have seen that bizarre picture of him smiling next to the 100-year old tree uprooted by the tornado last May.) If you spent as much time on your job as you do on fluffing your own image, the town would be in much better hands. The reality is that, despite that pricy legal degree, Dick has no clue when it comes to municipality work, state funding opportunities, procurement procedures, or financial propriety. ESPECIALLY financial propriety. After that same tornado, Dick ignored his oath of office which prohibits fundraising for the town and started a gofundme account to solicit funds for town cleanup. If he had the brains God gave a clam, he might have more productively – and ethically – sought some disaster relief funds. (Meanwhile, the paltry $656 he managed to raise still sits in the gofundme account seven months later. Great example of handling other people’s money responsibly, Dick. Why don’t you do the right thing and refund the donations?)

• And finally, when Dr. Dick does grace town hall with an appearance, the employees often wish he hadn’t. In a textbook example of how NOT to be an effective manager, he throws public temper tantrums, screams at employees in public, and for all we know holds his breath until he gets his way. Cursing and swearing in front of employees is pathetic, Dick. And the things you get all lathered up about boggle the mind. Case in point: the little girl and her grandfather who got trapped in the town hall bathroom due to a defective lock. When town employees could not get the door open, they called the fire department for help. For some reason, this (quite reasonable) initiative sent Dr. Dick into a towering rage, blathering at employees about how they have no authority to call for help without his permission. Dick, however, wasn’t in the building at the time, since he was on a town-paid trip to the Big Apple, so how he expected to resolve the issue is unclear. Perhaps he was hoping for an SDN picture of himself breaking down the door with a fire axe.

Dick, there might not have been many people who respected you when you walked in the door last November, but there’s even less now. You wanted this job; you should act like you deserved to be elected, rather than a potty-mouthed toddler lacking any resemblance of professionalism.

Dick Planning to Vacate Wappingers Estate

$5 million under-assessment hasn’t caught up with him yet.

Apparently three days a week at the office is just too much Wappingers for Dick to handle. Mere months after taking office, his mansion is on the market for a cool 6.5million dollars. Dr. & Mrs. Dick snapped up the sweeping 15-acre estate on the banks of the Hudson for a measly 1.5 million back in 2012 and he’s has spent the past five years and several more millions turning it into a temple of overindulgence and excess. His manor is tucked away behind an imposing stone wall with 20-foot high remote-controlled gates to keep out the riffraff, and among other pleasures includes a home theater and a nectarine orchard (where Dick reportedly indulges in naked gardening). 

Dick’s sky-high asking price versus his assessment brings to mind his campaign pledge to lower town assessments – despite the assessor being a separate and independent office and it would be not merely unethical but outright illegal to attempt to influence him. Over the last two years, many residents saw their assessments rise 5 to 15 percent due to the recovering market, but guess whose assessment didn’t budge? Parcel Access shows that Dick is sitting pretty with a 1.9 million assessment, in contrast to his neighbor’s 2.6 million, despite being smaller, less lavish and lacking in basic fat cat amenities: no orchard, no theater, no terraced gardens, no vineyard. It’s unclear how Dick managed this, as whispers from town hall inform us that the assessor has little respect for the Dicktor. The phrase “ignorant blowhard” might been used.

Dick isn’t draining the swamp, he’s draining the town bank accounts. What favors were promised to keep that assessment so low? Why is he so eager to cash in and vamoose? It’s apparent that Dick is a carpet-bagger who never had any intention of settling in Wappingers. For one thing, he has never changed his legal address: that’s still his New York City penthouse condo on the 35th floor of 101 Warren Street (currently valued at $20 million).