Another IDA Mirage: From Charlie Rosenthal’s Fair Store to Kansas Bank Ownership

UBy John Solak – Binghamton Daily

The building at 7-9 Court Street has long been a downtown Binghamton fixture. For more than 50 years it housed the Fair Store, the family furniture business of Charles L. “Charlie” Rosenthal. Born in Binghamton in 1920, Rosenthal was remembered as a classy and ethical local merchant. He operated the store for decades before retiring and later working with the Binghamton University Foundation. He died in 2010.

The property later came under the ownership of Adam Weitsman. During that period, according to local accounts, part of the building was leased to the Broome County Health Department. A break-in occurred in which computers were taken from the leased space; the theft was never solved. Weitsman retained local attorney Peter “Pete” Charnetsky—former Broome County Family Court Judge—to help preserve the lease amid the dispute.

By the early 2010s the historic structure, parts of which date to the 1860s–1880s and had previously served as a cigar factory and department store, sat largely vacant. Binghamton University alumni Ron Kutas and partners, operating as One Wall Street Associates, acquired it and converted it into Chenango Place. The project created roughly 176 student beds with study lounges, a fitness center, cinema room, and ground-floor retail space overlooking the Chenango River. The Broome County Industrial Development Agency approved a roughly $2 million, 10-year PILOT agreement in early 2014. The total project cost was reported at about $14 million. In 2015 the city received about $39,148 under the PILOT. An additional $250,000 state grant later supported commercial-space work.

At the September 2014 grand opening, officials presented the development as a centerpiece of downtown revitalization. Mayor Richard David said, “Once you go through you will see how significant, special and unique this project is.” Councilwoman Teri Rennia called it “such an amazing project” and predicted that filling the lower floors with retail would be “a tremendous, tremendous thing,” linking it to broader waterfront recovery efforts. Councilman Joe Mihalko, who recalled the building’s Fair Store days, said getting people back downtown was “tremendous.” Developer Kutas emphasized preserving historic elements while serving Binghamton University students.

Financing for the conversion included a consolidated multifamily note of $12.975 million originated around March 28, 2016 by Arbor Commercial Mortgage, LLC. In May 2018 the loan was securitized into the J.P. Morgan Chase Commercial Mortgage Securities Corp., Multifamily Mortgage Pass-Through Certificates, Series 2018-KX03, with U.S. Bank National Association serving as trustee. KeyBank later became special servicer.

Those projections did not hold. The project later encountered financial distress. On July 31, 2023, U.S. Bank National Association filed a foreclosure action in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York (case 3:23-cv-00928) against Chenango Place, LLC, members/guarantors Rachel Schiff and Abraham Gross, and the Broome County Industrial Development Agency. A receiver was appointed in 2024. On January 10, 2025, Judge Mae A. D’Agostino granted summary judgment and entered judgment of foreclosure and sale in the amount of approximately $13.3 million (principal balance then about $11.73 million plus interest, default interest, and other charges). The property was sold at foreclosure in April 2025. Ownership transferred to the bank, with KeyBank Real Estate Capital of Overland Park, Kansas listed as the contact in subsequent tax records. The 2026 assessment is $4,625,000, and the full property tax bill of approximately $246,993 was paid—ending the PILOT abatement and restoring full taxation under out-of-state ownership.

What began as a family furniture store under an ethical local merchant, passed through a period of county leasing and an unsolved computer theft under Weitsman ownership, then received IDA tax incentives as a promised catalyst for downtown revitalization, has ended as a bank-owned asset after a $13 million-plus foreclosure. The pattern is familiar in Broome County: public incentives and revitalization rhetoric for adaptive-reuse projects that later struggle, leaving taxpayers with the consequences and ownership shifting elsewhere. Chenango Place is another example of that cycle rather than the durable downtown transformation once promised.

Liars Figure: Stacey Duncan’s Own Personal Oktoberfest

By John Solak

Binghamton Daily

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Figures do not lie. The Broome County Industrial Development Agency’s explanations for a $62,441 trip to Germany in May 2025 do.

May is not Oktoberfest season. That did not stop Executive Director Stacey Duncan and a group of outside consultants from running up luxury hotel stays, alcohol-heavy meals, and consultant invoices that the agency then sought to have covered by a NYSEG grant ultimately funded by ratepayers. The Authorities Budget Office’s October 8, 2026 follow-up letter to Board Chair James R. Peduto shows the agency’s earlier claims do not match the documents.

BCIDA told the ABO that eight out-of-state trips and two international trips “were taken in accordance with and funded by a private grant” and that “the grantor took no issue with and reimbursed these expenses.” The ABO found no private grants were received during the review period for the travel in its report. The grant application covered only two trips totaling $70,937: $8,496 for a January 2025 California trip that included a roughly $4,000 Ritz-Carlton stay in Halfmoon Bay, and $62,441 for the May Germany trip. The remaining travel was never submitted for the grant.

Documents obtained by POLITICO show Duncan stayed at the Orania in Berlin and Hotel Bülow Palais in Dresden. She charged multiple meals exceeding $400, many including alcohol. Some of the receipts submitted to NYSEG were partly or wholly illegible or not itemized. She was accompanied by several outside personnel. Documents identify:

• Dirk Schneider of CJS Architects (the firm tied to the Broome Technology Park), who charged about $6,000 including more than $3,000 in airfare.

• Mathes Public Affairs (run by Alexander Mathes, a former IDA official previously criticized in a 2010 state audit), with one summary of nearly $6,000 in expenses for airfare, lodging, and food.

• LaMar Hill, who invoiced $8,500 in consulting services plus more than $6,000 in expenses.

• David Rooney, whose $11,280 invoice included an $8,500 consulting fee plus expenses.

• Consulting firm EDR (Environmental Design & Research, Landscape Architecture, Engineering, & Environmental Services, D.P.C.), a Syracuse-based firm that billed for trip-related expenses. EDR provides landscape architecture, civil engineering, environmental permitting, and SEQRA/GEIS work. Jo Anne Gagliano, a registered landscape architect, has served as president since 2008. Public documents do not name the specific EDR employee(s) who traveled or the exact amount billed for the Germany expenses.

In a January 2026 email to the ABO, Duncan wrote that NYSEG agreed with the trip’s purposes, that the funds were not public, and that if any expenses were denied, “the individual seeking reimbursement will reimburse the Agency… if at all, well beyond the scope of the Audit.” After the report became public, NYSEG spokesperson Leo Rosales stated that the expenses tied to the Germany trip and other costs not specifically tied to the grant’s intent “would have been disallowed had NYSEG not suspended their review process and paused this grant application.”

The October 8 letter asks for any documentation showing whether BCIDA has sought or received reimbursement from any employee or third party for any portion of that $70,937. The quality—or absence—of itemized receipts is central to whether recovery is even possible.

The same letter presses the rest of the unfinished business from the June ABO review, which flagged roughly $47,000–$50,000 in inappropriate or questionable credit-card spending, travel without written pre-authorization or cost controls, and other issues. It asks whether any internal review was conducted to recover costs for personal use or unjust enrichment, and specifically seeks documentation on:

• $3,752 in mileage costs claimed by Duncan beyond what her employment agreement allows (on top of the annual car/fuel allowance).

• $7,885 in Binghamton Club payments from the Chamber.

• $595 for airfare, alcohol, and food related to BCLDC expenses not reimbursed to BCIDA.

• $870 for an annual Chamber event in March 2022.

It also wants signed Acknowledgement of Fiduciary Duties and Responsibilities forms from board members, evidence that policies were reviewed and updated after the report (including a separate, detailed credit card policy), and documentation of steps taken to recover $3,796 in sales tax the agency was not legally obligated to pay.

The letter quotes the bylaws requiring directors to provide active oversight and stating that a majority vote is the act of the Board. It asks how members were briefed on the August response, whether they could edit it or provide feedback, and whether the board ever voted to approve the letter submitted to the ABO. It requests the related records. At the August 15 meeting, board member Kevin McManus had already questioned the limited involvement of the full board in shaping that response. Peduto replied that the board’s job was to approve it and focus on oversight rather than operations.

Vice Chair Peter G. Newman, copied on the October letter, is reported to have said after the original report that buying meals for your kids on the IDA was OK. That is the post-report mindset in one sentence. The same leadership that tried to restrict public comment at the July 15 meeting continues to treat the ABO’s questions as an inconvenience.

Christopher A. Andreucci of Harris Beach Murtha serves as legal counsel. The public responses to the ABO contain no visible reservations about the excess mileage, the unreimbursed charges, the alcohol and meals, the lack of written pre-authorization, or the attempt to shift the Germany trip costs onto a utility grant. There is no public record of counsel advising that the concurrent car allowance and mileage violated the employment agreement, that the employee-loaning arrangements raised serious legal questions, or that the board’s failure to vote on its own response violated the bylaws. Firms that serve as both deal counsel and general counsel for IDAs collect substantial transaction fees from the subsidy deals those agencies approve. The incentive structure does not favor raising hard objections to management’s preferred narrative.

The agency has long answered criticism by pointing to investment and job numbers tied to projects it supports, including the Broome Technology Park. The ABO’s follow-up does not contest those broader claims. It focuses on whether the specific controls, recoveries, policy updates, and board processes recommended months ago have actually been implemented, and whether earlier statements about grants and reimbursements match the documents.

Figures do not lie. The ABO is still waiting for the forms, the policies, the recovery records, and the evidence that the board did its job. Broome County residents and NYSEG ratepayers, whose money was used or sought for Stacey Duncan’s own personal Oktoberfest and the rest of the flagged spending, are still waiting for the same thing. The November 12 deadline will show whether the answers are forthcoming or whether the arrogance continues.

By John Solak

Binghamton Daily

October 13, 2026

Owego scrap magnate Adam Weitsman announced on X over the October 10–11 weekend that he had bought 117 Pudgy Penguins NFTs “on chain” to support one of his favorite collections “during a difficult time.” He said the purchase would “spread confidence” for the community, declared “The Huddle will stay strong,” and called for a “Return to Pudgy Penguins.”

The timing aligned with fresh bad news for the project. Days earlier, parent company Igloo confirmed it was shutting down Abstract, its Ethereum Layer-2 chain, after tens of millions in losses, and said it would refocus on the core Pudgy Penguins NFTs and the PENGU token. Crypto coverage treated the announcement as a confidence boost. Floor-price reports showed a roughly 16.7 percent jump to about 2.74 ETH, and CryptoSlam data put weekly sales up more than 125 percent to around $1.5 million through October 10. Weitsman’s reported total Pudgy holdings rose to roughly 167.

On-chain reviews have raised questions about the details. The wallet used for the open-market buying—0xb972c97213a47bf58fe2cce28eb3e2f65c842f97—was funded with roughly 353–373 ETH from Kraken within minutes of the Abstract shutdown announcement on October 6 and began purchasing Pudgy Penguins that same day, well before the weekend period highlighted in the post. Buying continued across the following days, with substantial volume on October 11. The wallet showed intermediate movements of ETH out and back before additional purchases. After buying stopped, the NFTs were transferred onward to addresses linked to Weitsman’s longer-term holdings.

That longer-term wallet is 0x250DC85178fB6859e9eE02c925d46AAb946a55E7, publicly associated with the OpenSea profile AdamWeitsmanGallery. It currently displays roughly 6,000 items with an estimated portfolio value in the low-to-mid seven figures. Visible holdings include multiple Bored Apes, hundreds of Meebits, HV-MTL, Otherside assets including Mega Kodas, the rare left-facing Pudgy Penguin #6873 (acquired earlier for 146.5 ETH), and various generative and art pieces. Weitsman has stated he holds more than 28,000 NFTs across wallets and has never sold any. He has previously used multiple addresses and, in June 2026, publicly merged four wallets ahead of a NormiesART snapshot specifically to reduce his own allocation.

This is not Weitsman’s first large, publicly announced NFT “support” buy. In August 2025 he disclosed a direct OTC purchase of more than 5,000 Yuga Labs assets—Otherdeeds, Mega Kodas, and Weapon Kodas—from the company itself. He described that deal in nearly identical language: a long-term investment to help a project that had refocused, with a commitment to further open-market buying. Yuga co-founder Greg Solano thanked him and said the intention was to hold. That transaction drew less on-chain scrutiny largely because it was a private OTC transfer from Yuga’s inventory rather than open-market activity through a freshly funded wallet.

The pattern is consistent: large, high-visibility buys timed to moments of project stress, accompanied by messaging about community confidence and long-term holding. With Yuga it was framed as a clean OTC commitment. With Pudgy Penguins the fresh-wallet funding, pre-weekend accumulation, fund movements, subsequent transfers into the Gallery wallet, and reports of paid promotional outreach (including a claim by one account of a $2,500 offer that was refused) have invited more pointed questions about whether the buying was entirely independent.

Weitsman built a substantial scrap recycling business in the Southern Tier after a 2004 federal bank fraud conviction (check-kiting charges; he pleaded guilty to dozens of felony counts, served roughly eight months, and paid a $1 million fine). He has long been active in NFT collecting. He is also currently engaged in defamation litigation in Broome County against this writer, Binghamton Daily, and another defendant over social media posts and articles he characterizes as a smear campaign.

Large announced NFT purchases by identifiable holders can move short-term sentiment and prices. When they coincide with a project’s operational setback, a newly funded wallet, timing discrepancies with public statements, and claims of paid promotion, they invite scrutiny. The Gallery wallet looks like a conventional long-term collector address. The October accumulation wallet is the one that produced the questions. Whether the activity reflects straightforward personal collecting or coordinated narrative support is a question the on-chain record and contemporaneous claims leave open. Greater transparency around large wallet activity and promotional arrangements would help separate genuine conviction from efforts to shape prices and perception.

As Paris Burns, Québécois Singer Celine Dion Provides the Soundtrack

By John Solak | Binghamton Daily

Every fall in the 1970s Frank Sinatra would play a lengthy stand at Carnegie Hall. Sinatra’s autumn of his years lasted a long time. New York was shedding its industrial base, interest rates were climbing, financial markets crumbled, and the city that once manufactured things was busy manufacturing nightlife and excuses. Studio 54 became the civic metaphor. New York pimping got so bad even Hefner had to close the Bunny Club. Through it all, Sinatra kept showing up, increasingly a self-parody of the ultimate nightclub pro, yet still the reliable soundtrack for a place that preferred the music to the ledger. He finally capped it by finding a Fred Ebb tune—“New York, New York”—that had languished in relative obscurity after the film. His comeback lasted a long time.

Paris now has its own version. Celine Dion, the Québécois singer who made an international career out of power ballads and precise diction, is the one providing the long residency while France sorts out what kind of republic it intends to remain. She is not Edith Piaf and she is not a female Charles Aznavour, but she is close enough for the current moment: a polished, high-volume interpreter of familiar material who can fill a hall while the larger argument continues outside. The theme from Titanic is a little too obvious as Sharia law breathes down the necks of the Gauls. A jaunty “Alouette” would fit better.

The argument is not subtle. French authorities and independent tallies have recorded a multi-year rise in attacks on churches and Christian sites. The country’s political class continues to debate how far accommodation of parallel legal and cultural norms can go before the secular framework that once defined the Fifth Republic becomes optional. Immigration, integration, and the practical reach of Sharia-derived expectations inside European cities are no longer fringe talking points; they appear in parliamentary reports, interior-ministry statistics, and the platforms of parties that keep gaining ground. None of this is solved by a concert.

There is an extra layer of irony in the choice of soundtrack. Dion was the thirteenth child in a large Québécois family—fourteen kids in all, born into the kind of Catholic household that once defined rural Quebec. Her mother, Thérèse, did not get the memo on modern family planning. Canada, and Quebec in particular, later became a laboratory for the opposite approach: aggressive promotion of smaller families, low fertility rates, and the social policies that followed. The country that produced the star from a household of fourteen now imports its population growth and treats large families as a demographic curiosity. Oh, Canada. “Alouette” would at least own the origin story.

Dion’s presence functions the way Sinatra’s did: it supplies continuity and distraction at the same time. The voice is strong, the arrangements are familiar, the audience can leave believing the city still knows how to stage a proper evening. Outside the venue the churches continue to be vandalized or burned, the demographic and political trends that produced the current unease keep moving, and the permanent class of commentators treats the singer’s residency as evidence that everything is still basically fine. Paris is burning, so what? The EU Nazis will save us. What’s the set list tonight? What is she wearing tonight? Sinatra’s autumn of his years lasted a long time. Dion’s stand will last as long as the tickets sell.

New York in the 1970s eventually confronted its numbers—fiscal collapse, crime, and the departure of employers—because the music could not rewrite the municipal budget. Paris will face the same test. A Canadian singer delivering the classic repertoire, herself the product of a large family her own country later decided was obsolete, does not reverse church arsons, alter fertility rates, or settle the question of whether French law remains supreme in every neighborhood. It merely keeps the lights on and the orchestra in tune while those questions wait their turn. The soundtrack is excellent. The financial, moral and political balance sheet is not.

Fool Me Once: Dellapenna Quit the Bench for Risk. He’s Back With Both.

By John Solak

Binghamton Daily

Thomas J. Dellapenna Jr. resigned as Town of Union Justice in 2013 so he could take the job of Broome County Risk and Insurance Manager. The move was clean at the time. He left the bench. The town appointed a replacement. He started the county post in January 2014 and has held it ever since.

In June 2026 the Town of Union board appointed him again and swore him in as Town Justice. He remains Broome County’s Risk and Insurance Manager. The Johnson City village court page also lists him as Acting Village Justice. The same man who stepped off the bench to manage the county’s risks is now back on a local bench while he still holds the risk job.

The loophole you will hear is that this time he was appointed Town of Union Justice rather than elected. Appointment does not erase the duties. The judicial ethics rules and the common-law compatibility test look at the offices held, not the method of selection. A part-time justice who also runs the county’s risk and insurance program still sits in both seats.

Dellapenna is a graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law School. That is the credential on his attorney registration. Cooley has long ranked near the bottom of accredited law schools on bar passage and employment metrics. The degree does not change the dual-role problem. It does not supply a reason the rules should be read differently for him than for any other part-time justice.

New York’s common-law rule on dual office-holding treats two positions as incompatible when their duties clash or one creates an appearance that cannot be fixed by occasional recusal. The Attorney General’s 1999 informal opinion on a county risk-management director and a town supervisor reached exactly that conclusion when the town participated in the county’s insurance program. The director decided claims involving people the supervisor worked with every day. Recusal would have gutted a core part of the job.

The Rules Governing Judicial Conduct apply a parallel test. A part-time justice may hold public employment only if it does not conflict or interfere with judicial duties and does not create an appearance of impropriety. In 2011 the Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics told a town justice he could not also serve as county manager and budget officer for the same county. Influence over the district attorney’s and public defender’s budgets, even without final say, was enough. Insulation did not cure it.

Dellapenna’s risk-manager role is not identical to a budget officer’s, but it is close enough to raise the same problem. The office handles the county’s self-insurance and liability exposures. If the Town of Union, its employees, its court, or related parties generate claims that run through that office, the justice who also runs the office sits on both sides of the table. County agencies, the district attorney, and the sheriff appear in town and village courts. The appearance does not disappear because he left the bench once, was later appointed back, and kept the risk job the entire time.

The other roles make the picture denser, not cleaner. He sits on the boards of SEPP, Inc., SEPP Management, and the SEPP Foundation. Family land in the Town of Union and Maine has been the subject of Broome County IDA purchase discussions for a technology park, with figures discussed in the $1.2 to $1.4 million range. He maintains a private law practice in Johnson City. None of these is automatically illegal. Each adds a screen that a sitting justice is supposed to manage, and each sits on top of the dual public roles he already holds.

He resigned the justice post in 2013 to take the risk job. He was appointed back to the bench in 2026 and still holds the risk job. Fool me once. The resignation was the clean break. The return undoes it. Until one of the two public positions is given up, the incompatibility that the Attorney General and the judicial ethics committee have already described remains in place.

John Solak is a Binghamton-area resident, longtime attendee of public meetings, and advocate for government and nonprofit transparency.

Is Old Vestal Finally Finished? The Butler-Shapiro Town Justice Race Will Tell Us

By John Solak, Binghamton Daily

Politics in Vestal has long been a crazy-quilt affair of family names, local networks, and swings with the presidential cycle. Some surnames have appeared across generations in town offices, on the board, and in the police department. School bus drivers rose to the town board and further; former Assemblyman Bob Warner is one of the better-known examples of that path. Multi-generation local ties used to make the difference between who got the call and who stayed on the outside. The same pattern held among the town’s lawyers. Longtime Town Justice Joseph B. Meagher held the bench for more than thirty years. Local attorneys cycled throug

h school-board work; the late Joel A. Scelsi was one of them. Michael D. Sherwood of Sherwood & Sherwood P.C. served as both Town Justice and school attorney; in 2009 he settled a pension-abuse case with the Attorney General’s office after being improperly listed as a part-time school-district “employee” from 1995 to 2008 to accumulate credits while keeping a private practice.

The Broome County Legislature side followed a similar pattern, with one notable exception. Democrat Barry Klipsch won a term in 2008; his career was cut short by health problems, and he died in 2014. The durable line ran through Republicans: insurance agent Brian Mather, Bob Warner, and current Legislature Chairman Dan Reynolds, a lifelong Vestal resident and former Warner chief of staff. Reynolds’ District 5 has expanded over successive redistrictings and now reaches into the Town of Union. Another local figure who illustrated the model was Bob Moppert. A Vestal-area businessman (co-owner of Mapes Mayflower Moving Co.), he won a Broome County Legislature seat in 1986 and was chosen Majority Leader as a freshman. He ran for Congress three times against Maurice Hinchey (1992, 1994, and 2000), coming within roughly 1,200 votes in 1994. After those campaigns he secured a lucrative appointment as Southern Tier regional director / economic development official with Empire State Development, a post he held until retiring around 2007. He died in 2011 at age 69. Local business to county legislature to well-paid state development job was a familiar track. Emil Bilecki, who moved from Johnson City to Vestal, ran unsuccessfully for Broome County Executive and then used the exposure from that race to become Vestal Town Clerk.

The machine continued in updated form. Aaron Martin, who got his start in local politics working for the late State Senator Tom Libous, spent roughly 15 years as Clerk of the Broome County Legislature under Chairman Dan Reynolds before winning the 2025 race for Broome County Clerk. He defeated Nick Libous, the senator’s son. An old Libous protege who became a Reynolds loyalist, Martin’s elevation shows how the older networks still convert long service into countywide office.

Local campaigns themselves could be quirky. Radio announcer John Leslie (known on air under that stage name; real name Jan Kokochak) failed in a bid for Town Supervisor. He initially ran under the stage name and was later pressed into using his real name, an embarrassment that undercut the effort. The campaign’s signature issue boiled down to whether a call box was sufficient for the night shift at the police station. It was the kind of small-ball local controversy that once defined Vestal politics. Figures like Bob Nasiatka moved in and out of visibility depending on who won the presidential race and which local networks held sway.

At Town Hall the old pattern broke down faster. Longtime Democratic Town Supervisor John Schaffer’s attitude and the financial and legal collapse around Republican Town Board member Stephen Donnelly scrambled everything. Schaffer lost the 2023 Democratic primary to Maria Sexton, then ran on the Conservative line and lost. Donnelly resigned in early 2025 amid nearly $3 million in personal and business debts, customer and supplier lawsuits, and a bank fraud suit. The resulting distaste cleared the field. One of the clearer signs of how blatant the self-dealing had become was the separation agreement given to longtime Police Chief John Butler at the end of 2021. A mere attorney letter produced a deal paying him roughly $229,000 in severance—more than $215,000 above the unused leave he was legally owed—plus continued health insurance. The town claimed it was to head off potential litigation; a later state Comptroller’s audit confirmed the payments were accurate under the agreement but noted the complete absence of written documentation justifying the size of the buyout or the litigation risk. Butler, who had previously led the Binghamton Police Department, died in 2026.

What arrived next was Sexton and her slate. Sexton is a former NYPD officer and sergeant of 20 years who created and supervised an animal-cruelty investigation program. Critics called her a triple-dipper and, more caustically, an “NYC dog control officer.” Once in office the new board proved every bit as intolerant and self-protective as the people they replaced. Controversies included her use of a town vehicle to stop a wrong-way driver, budget fights over school resource officers, clashes with the county over the Parkway Inn shelter, and a FOIL dispute with the town clerk. Campaign promises to challenge the Bunn Hill Road student-housing project (The Retreat at Bunn Hill) evaporated once she took office; the development that had been a centerpiece of opposition under the Real Democracy 4 Vestal banner proceeded. Whether the 2023 victory was a clean reform wave or simply a reflection of shifting demographics is open to debate. Brookdale senior-living communities and large numbers of active and retired Binghamton University UUP employees form a durable local voting bloc that blends reliably with broader progressive turnout. There are Hindu Republicans in town, but not enough of them to offset the BU students and the active and retired teacher vote. Vestal is moving to the point where party registration numbers will determine victory. The old family-and-network quilt had already been fraying; the Schaffer-Donnelly mess finished the job.

The local Democratic Party has shown a talent for shooting itself in the foot. It has repeatedly fielded questionable candidates who turned what should have been lead-pipe cinches into close shaves. Josh Shapiro is not one of them.

The last redoubt of the old volunteer culture may now be the fire hall. Longtime Fire Chief John Paffie, a 42-year department veteran, was forced to resign in May 2026 after conducting an improper traffic stop in his fire vehicle near his home. The board gave him the choice of resignation or termination; he resigned. His brother Chuck Paffie became acting chief. Bob Nasiatka, a 50-plus-year member of Station 1 who served as both Station and Department Chief, was another fixture of that same longtime volunteer network. The episode underscored that the longtime “Dukes of Hazzard” style of local leadership has been pushed out of Town Hall and the police department and is now largely confined to the volunteer fire service.

Whether the last pieces of the old arrangement are truly finished is what voters will decide on November 3, 2026, in the race for Vestal Town Justice.

Incumbent Republican Matt Butler is a lifelong Vestal resident who practiced at the family firm Butler, Mucci & Grace. He spent more than two decades as attorney to the Town Zoning Board of Appeals before the Democrat-led board appointed him Town Justice in 2021. He continued in the dual role for nearly five years and resigned the attorney post only in February 2026. Judicial ethics guidance states that a judge should not serve as counsel to a municipality’s Zoning Board of Appeals. His campaign says he raised the conflict at the time of appointment and was told to stay.

He faces Democrat Josh Shapiro (also on the Working Families line). Shapiro worked as an Assistant District Attorney specializing in violent crimes against children in Suffolk and Broome counties and now serves as Special Counsel for the Sixth Judicial District, supervising nearly 175 town and village courts.

The police chief’s office has its own local history of succession drama. Kenneth Rounds was removed in 2003 after misconduct charges. John Butler stepped aside at the end of 2021 with the large severance package described above. Stace Kintner, founder of the Youth Police Academy, took over in early 2022. In February 2024 he announced he was retiring at the end of the month to pursue other opportunities; the board promptly appointed Captain Christopher Streno as the next chief. Days later Kintner rescinded the retirement, saying there was more to accomplish. The board then reversed itself, rescinded Streno’s appointment, and kept Kintner. Streno later retired. The brief two-chiefs episode was an institutional fiasco. Kintner stayed on until announcing his actual retirement effective the end of January 2026; Lieutenant Vincent Stavola was named to succeed him.

Vestal has long moved with national election cycles. Binghamton University growth, senior communities, and shifting turnout have rewritten local majorities. The Schaffer-Donnelly collapse and the Sexton takeover showed the town board could be flipped overnight. Whether the justice’s office follows—after decades of Meagher, Sherwood, and the current dual-role questions around Butler—is the remaining open question. A Butler win would show that local roots and continuity still matter. A Shapiro win would mark a clearer break. Either way, the race is the clearest remaining test of whether the old Vestal order is finished—and whether the people who replaced it are any better.

Like the landmarks that once defined the Parkway—the old Vestal Steakhouse with its giant fiberglass bull, the Quonset-hut Vestal Theatre, and the futuristic “Potato Chip” Ken Wilson Chevrolet showroom—old-line Vestal politics is going the way of the wrecking ball. The physical landmarks are gone. The political ones are next.

Voters decide on November 3

***Vestal Town Court is now held in Johnson City, NY. The only Town in Broome County without a Court building of its’ own.

****As pointed out in the comments by former Carsons Rotary Little League great. I omitted Joe B. Munk. How could I have written this without mentioning his decade and half reign as Vestal as Town Supervisor?

Paul J. Kremer of Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff LLP, counsel for plaintiff Adam Weitsman. Kremer wrote the court on October 8 asking that the sealed accommodation order be opened to counsel of record.

In the Broome County defamation case Adam Weitsman v. John Solak, Binghamton Daily, and Jessica Miller-Cice (Index No. EFCA2025002780), a sealed court order on a judicial accommodation request became public while the docket still marked it sealed. Plaintiff’s counsel at Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff LLP has treated that order as something the firm is entitled to open, examine, and litigate. This is not the first time in the case that Benesch attorneys have gone after Solak’s disability—or paid to dig into his background.

Solak, appearing pro se, has Fuchs’ dystrophy, a progressive eye condition that limits how long he can read, and dyslexia. He asked the court for a judicial accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act and 22 NYCRR Part 52: more time to read papers, large-print or audio versions, and related measures so he can participate. That request is made to the court. It is not a claim against Weitsman. It is not a disability discrimination suit. The public entity that owes the accommodation is the court system. Opposing counsel has no role in the interactive process and no right to put the diagnosis on trial.

The pattern started earlier. In August, the court entered orders against Solak while the accommodation request was still unresolved. Solak has said the judge would not let him address the pending request at a hearing. Court records and prior filings show the accommodation file was open, emails about it had gone missing and then been located, and deadlines ran anyway. Benesch pressed for default and summary relief on an accelerated track. Solak’s response was that he had not been given the time the disability required. The firm’s position, repeated in motion papers and in public exchanges, has been that the coordinator did enough, that Solak did not respond properly, and that the disability should not slow the case.

Court filings in the case also show that Benesch paid for a background investigation on Solak. An invoice dated September 18, 2025, from Akshar Consulting, LLC, of Endwell, New York, billed to Benesch, charges $525 for emergency service of the summons and complaint (including multiple attempts and surveillance) and $125 for a “comprehensive background investigation on John Solak due to not being able to locate him for several days.” The total was $650. New York Department of State records list Frederick J. Akshar II as the person designated to receive process for that LLC. Akshar is the sitting Sheriff of Broome County. The firm’s public website identifies him as Owner/Principal and describes him as a current law enforcement executive. Public campaign-finance records show Weitsman contributed to Akshar’s campaign for sheriff. Solak has placed the invoice and the relationship on the record in his own filings, noting the long public history of political disagreement between himself and the sheriff. Hiring the sitting sheriff’s private company to run a background check and conduct surveillance on a local defendant is another way the plaintiff’s side has treated Solak as a target rather than a litigant entitled to access.

On October 7 the court filed NYSCEF Document 352, listed as “ORDER - OTHER,” status “Sealed,” filed by Court User. The next day Paul J. Kremer wrote Justice Joseph A. McBride. Kremer stated that counsel could not view the order on NYSCEF because it appeared sealed against both the public and the parties. He wrote that the firm understood the order related to Solak’s ADA accommodation requests. Because Solak has relied on those requests in seeking to set aside a default, Kremer argued, any judicial resolution “could bear on Plaintiff’s substantial rights.” He asked the court to make Document 352 available to counsel of record.

That request is the latest step over the line. Kremer’s own letter conceded that the firm “normally would not take an interest in the resolution of such a request,” except insofar as it might impose obligations on counsel. Seeking the sealed order anyway, and recasting a Part 52 access request as an “ADA claim” that affects the plaintiff’s rights, is an attempt to litigate the disability. The medical details and the court’s reasons belong in the accommodation file. They do not belong in Benesch’s case file.

On October 9 the seal failed in public. A non-party posting as Kayla Marie stated that the decision was not sealed and that “the entire document is uploaded for the public to see.” She posted a screenshot of page 1, opened from the Broome County Clerk website. The page names Fuchs’ dystrophy and dyslexia and lists the accommodations sought. Hours later Caitlin A. Kovacs, also of Benesch, emailed chambers that Document 352 was publicly available on the County Clerk’s image site, searchiqs.com, and supplied the link. NYSCEF still marked the document sealed. Counsel of record had said the parties could not open it. A non-party had published the first page, and plaintiff’s counsel had found the same order on the clerk’s public viewer.

The same morning the court clerk declined to accept updated medical information from Solak and instructed him to file it at the County Clerk’s office—the office whose public system was already serving the sealed order. Solak did not file it there. He has asked that the October 30 proceedings be adjourned until the public copy is removed or the court identifies where the seal failed. A one-line public order stating whether the accommodation is granted or denied, and any new deadline, would tell the parties what they need without restating a diagnosis.

Benesch has spent months treating Solak’s disability as a litigation problem for its client to solve, and it paid the sitting sheriff’s company to investigate him. The October letters and the public posting of the sealed order are the clearest example of going after the disability itself. A request for time to read is not a claim. A sealed accommodation decision is not a brief the other side gets to open. Hiring the sheriff’s firm for a background check, then pressing to unseal the accommodation order, is how a major law firm went over the line.

John Solak is a Binghamton-area resident, longtime attendee of public meetings, and advocate for government and nonprofit transparency.

The Anatomy of a SUNY Broome Backdoor Adjournment

By John Solak

BINGHAMTON, NY — There is a distinct brand of arrogance that belongs exclusively to public officials who believe their credentials place them above the mundane constraints of statutory law. On Thursday evening, the SUNY Broome Community College Board of Trustees provided a masterclass in this exact pathology, executing a bureaucratic disappearing act that was as legally clumsy as it was ethically crave

n.

The procedural details of the evening read like an amateurish heist, but the implications strike at the absolute core of civic accountability.

Faced with mounting institutional crises, the Board beat a hasty retreat into the shadows of an executive session. Under the New York State Open Meetings Law, entering an executive session requires strict adherence to a public ritual: a public body must host a proper procedural vote and name the exact litigation under review.

They did neither. They simply uttered the magic boilerplate phrase "pending litigation" like a medieval incantation, locked the doors, and vanished.

The Procedural Anatomy of a Backdoor Evasion

To understand the scale of the board’s statutory malpractice, one must trace the timeline of Thursday’s collapse. What was supposed to be a standard public meeting was systematically dismantled through a series of compounding legal violations:

• The Flawed Entry: The Board attempted to slip away under the pretense of "pending litigation." Yet, they failed to hold a valid procedural vote, and they completely refused to identify the specific case or legal action on the table.

• The Star Chamber Session: For the duration of the locked-door executive session, the public was left completely in the dark regarding matters that directly impact taxpayer dollars and campus safety.

• The Backdoor Escape: Rather than returning to the public dais to formally reconvene and host a transparent vote to adjourn, the trustees chose a cowardly exit. They simply opened the front doors, grabbed their stuff, and fled into the night.

• The Cracked-Door Defense: When directly challenged on why they bypassed the mandatory public reconvening, Trustee James Orband outdoor offered his instant-classic defense of statutory compliance: “Well, the door was opened a little.”

What makes this performance so spectacular is the sheer concentration of legal talent sitting on the SUNY Broome dais. This isn't a board composed of political neophytes or naive volunteers. Three of its voting members are licensed, practicing attorneys: Tia Fernandez, James Orband, and Kathy Connerton. To ensure maximum billable hours, they even saw fit to hire an expensive outside counsel to hold their hands for the evening.

Yet, this high-priced legal brain trust apparently forgot the most elementary tenets of municipal law.

The real theater, however, occurred after the secret enclave concluded. In New York, the law dictates that what begins in public must end in public. A board cannot simply dissolve a meeting from inside a locked backroom. They are legally required to open the doors, reconvene the open session, and vote to adjourn before the public eye.

Instead, the SUNY Broome Board chose cowardice over compliance. They unlocked the front door, grabbed their stuff, and fled into the autumn night.

Waiting in the corridor with the cameras rolling for @BinghamtonDaily, I attempted to extract a shred of accountability from this fleeing parade of public servants.

The resulting footage is a grimly comedic study in institutional stonewalling—and an astonishing look at how a practicing lawyer interprets statutory compliance. When I cornered Trustee James Orband and directly questioned him about the board's absolute failure to reopen the doors to the public and formally reconvene the meeting, his defense was nothing short of insulting.

"Well, the door was opened a little," Orband actually muttered to the camera.

Let that sink in. A licensed attorney, serving on a public board funded by your tax dollars, expects the community to accept that "opening the door a little" satisfies the constitutional and statutory mandate of the New York State Open Meetings Law. It is a defense that would get a first-year law student laughed out of a classroom, yet Orband offered it with a straight face while walking out the front door.

The rest of the leadership was equally allergic to transparency.

• Board Chair Barb Fiala had nothing to offer.

• Trustee Kathy Connerton suddenly lost her appetite for legal discourse.

• SUNY Broome President Tony D. Hawkins flatly refused to flesh out the details, treating legitimate journalistic scrutiny as an administrative nuisance.

This desperate urge to hide is, of course, entirely symptomatic of an administration under siege.

The college is currently choking on its own legal liabilities. In federal court, two separate Christian organizations—InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Bible Fellowship—have hit the institution with major civil rights lawsuits over the suppression of religious liberties.

Simultaneously, the administration is staring down a toxic, explosive employment retaliation lawsuit filed by a former member of campus law enforcement. That former officer alleges he was systematically targeted and terminated by this very board after acting as a whistleblower regarding the college's dubious policies on campus peace officers carrying firearms.

These are not private corporate matters; they are profound questions of public safety, civil rights, and the expenditure of taxpayer funds.

The Legal Fallout: Courting an Article 78 Lawsuit

By running this meeting like a secret society, these trustees aren't just looking bad—they are exposing the college to even more litigation. Under New York State law, a court challenge under Article 78 can be filed against public bodies that intentionally violate the Open Meetings Law.

Because the board failed to hold a proper vote to enter executive session and refused to reconvene in public, a judge has the power to declare any actions taken or decisions made during that secret session completely null and void. Furthermore, the court can force the college to pay the public's attorney fees and mandate that the board undergo mandatory transparency training. For a board featuring three practicing attorneys, being court-ordered to take a remedial class on basic open government laws would be the ultimate public humiliation.

When the people paid to understand the law decide that the law can be circumvented by a literal crack in the doorway, the institution they govern ceases to be a seat of higher education. It becomes something far more cynical: a taxpayer-funded redoubt for officials who are terrified of the public they are sworn to serve.

Watch the shocking video of the board's post-session escape and the hallway confrontations right now on the official Binghamton Daily X Account.

The John Hall Surcharge

How a Woodstock guitarist, two radio hits, and the No Nukes crusade helped raise New York’s electric bill

By John Solak

Every month the envelope arrives, or the app lights up, and somewhere in the tangle of delivery charges, system benefits, and “other adjustments” sits a cost that no line item will ever name. Call it the John Hall surcharge. It is not a tax he sponsored. It is the long arithmetic of a political victory he helped win.

Hall understood royalties before he understood rate bases. With his then-wife Johanna he co-wrote “Half Moon.” Janis Joplin cut it for Pearl; Columbia put it on the B-side of “Me and Bobby McGee.” In the mechanical-royalty world of 1971, the flip paid like the smash. That check bought a house. Orleans, with Larry Hoppen’s unnervingly clean tenor, bought the rest: “Dance With Me,” “Still the One,” millions of spins, a career that looked, for a few years, like permanence.

Then the hits thinned. Hall left the band, formed the John Hall Band, and occupied the same early-MTV frame as Tom Petty—lean, guitar-forward, a little restless on camera. The music receded. Opportunity did not. In April 1979, Three Mile Island turned a reactor accident into a morality play. Hall was already fighting a proposed plant at Cementon on the Hudson. He co-founded Musicians United for Safe Energy with Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Graham Nash. The No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden that September were both festival and organizing meeting. Hall’s song “Power” became the anthem. Cementon died. A generation of Democratic activists learned that nuclear power was not an engineering problem but a character test.

Hall converted the moment into office the way a good songwriter converts a hook. He helped write Saugerties’s first zoning law. He won a seat on the Ulster County Legislature after killing a landfill-and-incinerator plan on the Winston Farm. He served on the Saugerties school board, became its president, and got budgets passed after voters had rejected them. In 2006 he beat a six-term Republican for New York’s 19th Congressional District—the rock musician in the House. Two terms later the wave took him out. The résumé is tidy: songwriter, school-board president, county legislator, congressman. The through-line is energy.

The surcharge is the through-line’s invoice. New York did not close every reactor because of one guitarist. Shoreham’s fiasco on Long Island, later fights over Indian Point, gas-market swings, transmission limits, and the state’s appetite for subsidies all matter. But the cultural weather of 1979 mattered too. “No nukes” stopped being a concert slogan and became the respectable default. Plants that might have been built were not. Plants that existed faced a permanent political headwind. Baseload that did not get built was replaced by gas, imports, and a renewable stack whose costs and reliability remain arguments rather than settled facts. Ratepayers absorbed the difference. Hall did not design the Public Service Commission. He helped make the politics that the commission inherited.

There is a particular American career that treats the stage and the dais as adjacent rooms. Hall was never a tourist. Bandmates remembered him lecturing crowds about plutonium between the choruses. He read the reports. He attended the hearings. He learned the zoning code. The same instinct that saw a B-side as a house payment saw Three Mile Island as a second act. Entertainment success became legitimacy. Legitimacy became office. Office became the long, quiet work of keeping a technology politically radioactive.

The songs still play at weddings. “Still the One” has outlasted most of the arguments that once surrounded its author. The bill has not. It arrives without a credit, the way mechanical royalties once arrived without a sermon—except this time the check is written by people who never saw the Garden shows and never asked for the encore.

The Grand Funk Railroad of Justice Arrives: How Procedural Traps and Cognitive Bias Devalue Pro Se ADA Litigants

By John Solak
Published on the Binghamton Daily Substack

BINGHAMTON, NY — In the theater of American jurisprudence, there is a comfortable fiction we tell ourselves: that the law is blind, the playing field is level, and anyone with a defense can stand before a judge and be heard on the raw merits of their case. But when you are forced to represent yourself (pro se) while simultaneously navigating a severe, debilitating medical impairment, that fiction quickly unravels into a harsh procedural reality.

My perspective isn’t born out of abstract academic interest. It is forged directly from the trenches of the State Supreme Court in Broome County, right here in downtown Binghamton. The offices of the NYS 6th Judicial District is right across the Chenango Street viaduct from the old passenger train station that now houses Station 45 American Chop House. Looking out at those tracks, I watch the freight trains roll by and think about how the machinery of our local courts has become a different kind of train—a mechanical meat-grinder running over the constitutional rights of everyday citizens.

As the self-represented defendant in the multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit, Weitsman v. Solak, filed against me by Owego billionaire businessman Adam Weitsman, I have experienced firsthand the exact systemic biases that academic researchers have documented for years. This case isn’t the legendary 1985 Pennzoil v. Texaco battle over corporate handshakes and billions in oil assets. It doesn’t involve multinational conglomerates or Wall Street investment bankers. But it is just as important. While Pennzoil showed what happens when corporate titans clash with elite legal armies on a level playing field, Weitsman v. Solakexposes a much more pervasive crisis threatening the American legal system: the quiet, administrative execution of a citizen’s right to defend themselves.

The Science Behind the Blueprint of Bias

The judiciary frequently relies on a rigid bureaucratic doctrine: pro se litigants must be held to the exact same technical standards as seasoned, career attorneys. On paper, this is framed as procedural neutrality. In practice, it operates as an institutional trap—especially when an individual requires disability accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

A landmark study on courtroom decision-making (Kroeper et al., 2020) explicitly exposes this systemic hurdle. Researchers found that when two legal cases have identical facts, judges, mediators, and legal officials routinely assign significantly lower merit and credibility to the party representing themselves. The legal establishment frequently treats pro se status as a shortcut descriptor for incompetence or a procedural burden. Rather than focusing objectively on the raw evidence or the constitutional protections of the individual, the system triggers cognitive heuristics—mental shortcuts—that give the represented, wealthy opponent an unearned psychological and strategic edge.

Providing self-represented parties with procedural handbooks or minor accommodations doesn’t solve the underlying problem, because it fails to address the intrinsic bias held by the decision-makers themselves.

The Compounding Burden of the ADA and New York CPLR 52(g)

In my ongoing legal battle, a medical condition causing intermittent visual impairment made it physically impossible to read, analyze, and timely process the massive volume of intricate legal filings weaponized by a well-funded corporate adversary. In my sworn filings to the court, I have detailed this exact reality, explaining that during morning flare-ups caused by Fuchs’ endothelial dystrophy, text is rendered a complete blur. This creates an insurmountable physical wall between myself and the court.

The consequences of ignoring these disabilities are dangerous and documented. The July court record reveals that after being pushed through a morning proceeding without protections, I suffered mild confusion, delayed responses, and ended up in the emergency room hours later with triage notes recording a feeling that I was “going to die.”

Despite this medical reality being before the court, my explicit requests for a written order under 22 NYCRR Part 52(g) granting tailored, meaningful ADA reading accommodations—such as enlarged type and extra reading time—remain unissued.

Instead of recognizing an ADA accommodation request as a mandatory civil rights mechanism to ensure basic courtroom access, the system’s underlying bias mischaracterizes the request as a delay tactic or a failure to comply with the rules. While the court granted extensions after my initial counsel withdrew, the mechanical deadlines ultimately caught up. State Supreme Court Justice Joseph McBride issued a default judgment, resolving a $5 million claim without a single piece of evidence ever being tested in front of a jury or Binghamton Daily’s journalistic truth ever being evaluated.

This system demands absolute, flawless adherence to its complex technical schedule, yet simultaneously denies the basic physical access required to meet those very demands. It enforces a clock against a visually impaired person who was structurally blocked from reading it.

This dynamic becomes even more suspect when looking at the post-judgment machinery. In New York, the execution and enforcement of money judgments operate under strict statutory rules. The court’s rush to default bypasses crucial protections, shifting the battlefield directly to enforcement mechanisms under New York CPLR § 52(g) or corresponding local rules regarding the signing and indexing of transcripts of judgment.

When a court ignores an ADA violation to issue a default, it fast-tracks an adversary’s access to asset enforcement provisions without ever testing the validity of the underlying claim. The system allows an opponent to utilize the severe weight of New York’s Article 52 judgment collection powers against a defendant whose only “fault” was an inability to physically read the papers used to corner them.

The Motion Frenzy, the PI Sideline, and the Double Standard

Nowhere is the structural rot more glaringly obvious than in the chaotic administrative theater surrounding my co-defendant, Jessica Miller, and the broader docket. It has devolved into a calculated, aggressive motion frenzy designed to isolate me completely.

The latest escalation crystallized in a formal objection I filed with Hon. Joseph A. McBride regarding an upcoming Thursday, September 24 conference at 10:00 a.m. While the court calendar explicitly lists this appearance as a “Conference – Unknown” for case-management and scheduling purposes, the plaintiff’s legal team has attempted to transform it into an unscheduled motion day.

When my previous attorney, missed a critical conference slot, the opposing legal machinery didn’t just proceed neutrally—Weitsman attorneys weaponized the absence to spin a narrative of total chaos. They flooded the docket with a barrage of rapid-fire filings and cross-motions. This has culminated in a calculated push to turn a status conference into an open-ended “motion festival”—packing multiple notices, opposition papers, and oral arguments into a single hour.

This hyper-aggressive motion frenzy highlights a striking systemic double standard. The rules of CPLR 2214and standard court practice mandate that motions be brought on by proper notice or an order to show cause with a stated return date, giving a pro se litigant a realistic opportunity to respond. Attempting to bypass these notice and return-date rules allows plaintiff’s counsel to use a basic conference as a shortcut ambush. While Jessica Miller’s active position in the case remains a moving piece, my entire defense is subjected to a procedural matrix that treats a corporate scheduling absence as an offensive opportunity, but treats my legitimate, medical reading barriers as a compliance failure.

The integrity of this local docket is fractured further by recent revelations detailing deep-seated conflicts of interest. Co-defendant Jessica Miller has formally petitioned Judge McBride to recuse himself from the case, pointing directly to a professional relationship with Broome County Sheriff Fred Akshar alongside the stunning discovery that Akshar’s private security and investigative firm, Akshar Consulting, LLC, performed private work for Adam Weitsman’s legal team.

The fact that the county’s sitting Sheriff operates a private investigator sideline hired by the billionaire plaintiff creates a severe conflict of interest, casting a long shadow over the neutrality of the court’s proceedings. It connects directly to dynamics I’ve aggressively investigated on the Binghamton Daily Substack, most notably in my recent exposé, “Two Badges, One Client List”. In that piece, I directly examined how political relationships involving local law enforcement leadership, Sheriff Fred Akshar, Undersheriff Davis, and regional political structures intersect with high-stakes civil litigation to insulate the powerful while weaponizing bureaucracy against independent voices.

Seeking to Vacate the Precedent

Weitsman v. Solak is important because it lays bare a dangerous precedent: that a wealthy plaintiff can win a massive judgment simply by outlasting an unrepresented, impaired defendant on a procedural chess board. It proves that under the current judicial culture, procedure can be easily weaponized to mask a deeper cognitive prejudice against the vulnerable.

Justice cannot survive in an environment where financial muscle is equated with legal credibility, and where a citizen is pushed off the tracks before they even reach the station. Because of these systemic failures, I have filed formal motions to vacate the default judgment (Seq. #16) and declare a mistrial based explicitly on these unaddressed ADA violations.

I am fully prepared to appear on September 24 for a genuine conference to identify what is pending, what has been decided, and the status of my Part 52 request. I am not prepared to treat that hour as an open-ended motion calendar designed for ambush.

The “Grand Funk Railroad of Justice” must not be an administrative engine of disfranchisement that runs over the unrepresented. It must be a station where the law is applied equally to all, regardless of wealth, institutional backing, or physical capability. Until the courts actively confront and correct their own psychological prejudices against pro se ADA litigants, the promise of equal protection under the law remains an illusion reserved only for those who can afford it.

We’ve Come a Long Way Since “Book ’em, Danno”

By John Solak

Binghamton Daily

On Hawaii Five-O, Steve McGarrett did not throw a suspect face-down on the pavement and sit on his lungs. He pointed. He snapped the line America still remembers: “Book ’em, Danno.” Hands went up. Cuffs went on. The camera cut away. That was television, not a training manual. It was also closer to what people actually saw on the street than what we see now.

Give me that Irish cop with the nightstick any day of the week. Sean Connery’s Malone in The Untouchables — now there is a man who could crack a skull. He did not need a SWAT script to do it. He walked up on two feet, said what he meant, and the stick was a last argument, not an opening hymn. That is a different animal from “get on the ground” for a taillight.

I do not remember police ordering people onto the pavement as a first move. Sixty years ago the command was “hands up,” or “hands on the hood,” or “spread ’em.” You stayed standing. The officer controlled your hands. That was the point.

Today the script is different. Get on the ground. Hands behind your back. Stay there. It is treated as routine, as if it has always been the American way of making an arrest. It has not.

Like most professions now, police work is caught between a fake extreme professionalism and hair-trigger rage. One minute it is policy manuals, body cameras, “verbal judo,” and a seminar on de-escalation. The next minute it is a man on his face in the street because he did not drop fast enough. The language is corporate. The pulse is combat. Neither one looks like Malone on the stoop.

When “get down” arrived

“Hands up” is as old as modern policing. Hands are where a weapon lives. “Get down” is newer.

Police trainers themselves have traced the tactical “Get down!” command to July 1976, when Israeli commandos stormed Entebbe. They ordered everyone to the floor so they could tell hostages who complied from terrorists who stayed standing. After Entebbe, American SWAT teams copied the line. SWAT itself was still young. Los Angeles built its unit after Watts in 1965. The language of special teams leaked into ordinary patrol through the late 1970s and the 1980s — the same years Hawaii Five-O was still telling the country that an arrest ended with a pair of cuffs and a ride downtown.

By the early 1990s, “prone-outs” were common enough in Los Angeles that the department started requiring extra paperwork because neighborhood leaders said the tactic was being used too freely, too fast, and too often on people who were not a threat.

That is not ancient history. That is a change within living memory.

When the cuffs moved to the back

The hardware is old. The swing-through handcuff that officers still use was patented in 1912 and sold by Peerless starting in 1914. What changed is where the hands go.

For decades, police often cuffed people in front. Walking was easier. Sitting in a car was easier. Rear cuffing became the taught standard around the mid-1960s. Trainers give the same reasons now that they gave then: harder to pick a lock, harder to grab a gun, harder to fight.

By the 1990s it was doctrine. Front cuffing survived as the exception — pregnancy, a ruined shoulder, a body that will not bend that way. Everyone else gets the arms twisted back.

Sixty years ago was 1966. That is the hinge. Front cuffing was still ordinary. Rear cuffing was becoming the rule. If you remember a different street, you are not inventing it. McGarrett’s generation was still working that street.

A lot of them have already been to war

Veterans have always gone into police work, and they should. The job wants people who have already been tested. After Iraq and Afghanistan more of them came home and put on a badge. About one in five American officers has served. In the country at large it is closer to one in sixteen.

That is not an accusation. Most of those men and women are not trying to clear a house on Main Street. They are looking for a paycheck, a pension, and work that still feels like service. The risk is not the service record. The risk is a department that already talks like a raid team, then hands the same playbook to people whose last classroom was a doorway in a war. In 2009 the International Association of Chiefs of Police itself noted that for some returning combat veterans, the combat environment and the policing environment “may appear surprisingly similar.” The chiefs said it. The rest of us are allowed to notice it.

The sidewalk is still a sidewalk. It is not a doorframe in Anbar. The public can tell the difference.

What the body pays

These are not costume changes. They have a body count and an injury list, even if nobody in Washington keeps a clean ledger.

An Associated Press investigation of 2012 through 2021 found more than 1,000 people dead after police used force that is not supposed to kill — holds, Tasers, takedowns, not gunshots. At least 740 of those deaths involved being held face-down. In about half of those 740, officers kept pinning the person after the handcuffs were already on. Medical examiners named prone restraint or positional asphyxia as a cause or contributing factor in about 61 cases. In many others they blamed drugs, a bad heart, or the catch-all of “excited delirium,” and left the hold off the death certificate.

The Justice Department warned departments in 1995: once the suspect is cuffed, get him off his stomach. That warning is older than a lot of officers now on the street. It is still ignored.

Most prone cuffing does not kill anyone. Police use force hundreds of thousands of times a year. Prospective studies that followed thousands of consecutive prone restraints found no deaths in those samples. Death is rare compared with how often the position is used. It clusters when weight stays on the back, when the person is large, high on stimulants, in psychiatric crisis, or left face-down after they have already been controlled. Rare is not the same as imaginary. Families do not bury “rare.”

Rear cuffing kills almost no one by itself. It injures people in ways that never make a national database. The classic injury is handcuff neuropathy — the superficial radial nerve crushed at the wrist, numbness and burning in the thumb and the back of the hand. Wrist fractures show up too. Because the hands cannot break a fall, faces, teeth, and shoulders take the pavement. Shoulders pay again when arms are forced behind a body that does not want to go there.

Zip ties are worse. Leave them tight and long enough and you are not restraining someone. You are cutting off a limb’s blood supply.

The combination is the problem

The two tactics travel together. Get on the ground. Cuff behind the back. Stay prone. That sequence — not either step alone — is what turns up in the death files.

Officer safety is a real sentence. A person with free hands can produce a gun in a second. Nobody serious argues that police should walk into a fight with a smile and a notepad. The question is whether the default for a traffic stop or a disorderly call should look like a raid on a hostage plane.

Training followed SWAT. Language followed training. Policy followed language. Then came the other half of the modern job: the laminated professionalism. Mission statements. PowerPoints. “Best practices.” A force that can quote a use-of-force continuum and still put a knee in a man’s back because the blood went up. Fake polish on one shoulder. Hair-trigger on the other. That is not unique to police. Teachers, administrators, hospital systems, and half the offices in this county run on the same split — a handbook for the file and a temper for the hallway. On a street, the split has a body under it.

Oversight did not keep up. There is still no national rulebook. A 1995 federal bulletin is guidance, not law. California and Washington have tried to restrict prone restraint after people kept dying the same way. Most of the country has not.

Contempt is not a mystery

Since these less-than-gentlemanly tactics became the ordinary opening move, contempt for the police has grown in plain sight. Gallup did not start asking the question until 1993, well after the shift was underway. Even in that shorter window the story is ugly enough. Confidence in police hit 64 percent in 2004. After George Floyd it fell to 48 percent, then to a record low of 43 percent in 2023. It has bounced some since. A bounce is not a restoration.

You can blame the cameras. You can blame the politics. You can blame the worst cases and pretend the rest of the footage is a smear. The simpler explanation is the one any beat cop of the old school would have understood: people do not like being put on the ground like enemy combatants for a broken taillight. They also do not like being lectured in professional English by a man who two seconds later is screaming them into the asphalt. Respect is not a union benefit. It is what you get when the public still recognizes the job.

The nightstick cop could be rough. Connery’s Malone was rough on purpose. Nobody with a memory should pretend the old beat was a prayer meeting. He was also there. He did not need a rifle plate, a command from Entebbe, and a binder full of “core values” to end an argument on a Saturday night. The new posture asks for fear first and a press release second, then wonders why the greeting is gone.

What we are asked to accept

We are asked to accept that a command invented for commandos in 1976 belongs on every sidewalk. We are asked to accept that cuffing in front, which police did for generations, is now a special accommodation. We are asked to accept that “get them off their stomach” has been the official advice for thirty years while the videos keep showing the opposite. We are asked to accept the seminar and the scream as the same profession.

“Book ’em, Danno” was a punch line. It was also a picture of an arrest that ended on two feet. We have come a long way since then. The question is whether longer is the same as better.

I am a Binghamton-area resident, a longtime attendee of public meetings, and an advocate for government and nonprofit transparency. Institutions change their habits and then pretend the new habit is tradition. This one is not tradition. It is a post-1960s import that hardened in the drug-war years, picked up a combat accent after two long wars, put a lanyard on it, and never got a public vote.

Hands up used to be enough. Give me the cop with the stick and the beat. If the ground is now mandatory, someone should have to explain why — and what it has cost in bodies, and in the one thing a police force cannot issue itself: the public’s regard.

Breakfast Was Served. Akshar Was on the Menu.

By John Solak

There are compromised sheriffs, and then there is the one they put on the plate.

Tuesday in Washington, Broome County Sheriff Fred Akshar sat before Congress as if the badge still meant what the campaign mailers said it meant. Representative Dan Goldman did not treat it that way. He treated it like a kitchen. By the time the questions stopped, breakfast had been served and Akshar was what was left on the china — a Southern Tier lawman explaining, again, why the rules that apply to deputies somehow never quite applied to him.

This is not a story about one bad afternoon on Capitol Hill. It is the story of a leftover. Tom Libous went down for lying to the FBI. Twelve days later the county chairs wheeled out Undersheriff Fred Akshar — no prior race, no Albany scar tissue — and told the district he was new blood. He was not new blood. He was the machine’s spare tire. He inherited the seat. He inherited the staff. He inherited Jessica.

Jessica Williams was the actual leftover. Libous hired her in 2011. When the conviction emptied the office, she did not leave. She stayed on the new man’s payroll and rose with him: part-time $32,600 in 2015 to $85,000 by 2018 — eight raises, three promotions — until the relationship became public and they slid her onto Senate Republican central staff at the same number, still in Binghamton. The senator dated the Libous holdover whose pay had more than doubled on his watch. That is not a love story. That is how a machine reproduces.

The wedding on June 29, 2019, made the chain of command official. In any other workplace it would have been a personnel file. In this one it was a standing order: the boss’s private life is now the office.

When the Senate chapter closed, the pipeline did not. House disbursements for the first quarter of 2023 list Jessica A. Akshar on Rep. Marc Molinaro’s payroll as caseworker / field representative, $14,666.67 for January 3 through March 31. Pin money in the next Republican’s shop after the state taxpayer had already paid the last bill. She was gone by the time Molinaro’s office shut in January 2025. A courtesy, not a career.

She was no bargain, and neither was he. The 2019 wedding was her third trip to the altar. A Broome clerk index dated November 23, 2010, captions Fiacco, Jessica against Drihmi, Younes, matrimonial, CA2010003061. That is a court action. What the jacket holds is in the vault. What is not in any published file is a proven immigration scheme. What is in the file is a name, a date, and the woman who would marry the Libous replacement and then collect a House check from the congressman next door.

The same 2018 corporate line lists Fiacco, Jared as director of Cops 4 A Cause Ltd., C2018017952, July 17, 2018. The charity that still writes holiday checks from a Vestal box is run, on the 990s, by Scott Pauly and Sean Kilpatrick. Her name is not on the current officer line. The Ltd. filing is. In Broome, power does not always need the letterhead. It needs the index.

Then Turning Stone. In 2015, on the county’s dime, Akshar went to a law-enforcement conference at the casino in Verona. Mirella Masciarelli was there — not a colleague, the mother of a murder victim in a case his office had touched. Official Broome still wants that called personal. It was a tax-funded room, a sheriff, and a crime victim. No charge was filed. That is not the same as clean.

It walked into the Aaron Powell retrial in 2019. The first conviction had already collapsed for other reasons. The repair required a substitution. Testimony that should have come from the top of the house had to be carried by former undersheriff Alex Minor, so the case would not buckle under the man who ran the office. You do not park a stand-in on the stand because the file is too clean. You do it because the principal is the problem.

Compromised sheriffs usually pick one vice. Akshar collected them: the Libous seat, the Libous staffer, the raises, the wedding, the conference, the victim’s mother, the murder file rerouted around his name, the wife on Molinaro’s federal payroll. Goldman did not invent the inventory. He read it in a room with cameras.

The rest of New York’s sheriff class knows the type. Too many treat the star as a family firm. Some at least keep the mess off page one. Akshar is the bottom of that barrel because he never learned the first rule of a compromised institution: do not become the exhibit.

He sat in Washington and tried to look like the last honest cop in a dirty business. He was the leftover they sent after Libous. The leftover hired the leftover. The leftover married the leftover. And on a Tuesday in September, Congress finally put a fork in it.

Breakfast was served. Fred Akshar was on the menu. The rest of the state’s sheriffs should ask why the plate looked so familiar.

— John Solak is a Binghamton-area resident, longtime attendee of public meetings, and advocate for government and nonprofit transparency. This article was prepared for Binghamton Daily.

He Had a Lock. Then He Took the Makeup Tour.

By John Solak

We backed Anthony Constantino in the June primary. Not because he was polished. Because he wasn’t.

The Sticker Mule CEO from Amsterdam ran as the guy who put a giant “Vote for Trump” sign on his factory roof, self-funded the race so he wouldn’t owe the usual crowd, boxed for a lark at 40, and treated the New York GOP establishment like the losing operation it often is. President Trump endorsed him. The state party, most county chairs, and a stack of elected Republicans lined up behind Assemblyman Robert Smullen instead. Constantino still won 13 of 15 counties and roughly 59 percent of the vote.

That was the pitch: outsider versus the machine. In a district Donald Trump carried by about 20 points — the kind of North Country map that should produce a Watertown slaughter in November — it looked like a lock.

Then came the makeup tour.

Within days of the primary, county chairs who had done everything they could to stop him were issuing unity statements. Republican officials who had treated him like a virus started showing up at rallies. Gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman found his way to a Mayfield banquet hall to call Constantino an “anti-politician.” The same apparatus that preferred Smullen discovered, overnight, that the voters had spoken and it was time to get in line.

Unity after a primary is normal. This one felt like something else. The man who said he’d have to “clean out the Republican committees because they are losers” was suddenly standing next to them, smiling for the cameras. The outsider brand that won him the nomination started looking like a costume he was willing to take off the minute the votes were counted.

That is the problem. Anthony Constantino is his own worst enemy.

He is overbearing. He is over the top. He is just annoying enough to cost himself the kind of high-margin win this district should deliver on autopilot. The primary was already a street fight — nicknames, legal threats, a debate that ended with no handshake, a sheriff escorting him out of a St. Lawrence County GOP meeting. Afterward the lawsuits kept coming. Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar sued him for defamation over a recorded “we intend to kill you” remark Constantino treated as a literal threat. Another suit followed after he called a local chair’s fiancé a “repeat offender” and “violent bully.” High unfavorables showed up in polling almost immediately. One internal Democratic survey after the primary had him underwater on favorability even after millions in ads. A later SurveyUSA poll for WNYT had Democrat Blake Gendebien, a St. Lawrence County dairy farmer, ahead 43-39. A J.L. Partners survey in August put Constantino up 10.

The numbers bounce. The vibes do not. A lot of voters in a red district have already decided they don’t like the guy.

Gendebien is not a superstar. He is a farmer in a farm-and-factory district who won his primary cleanly and does not spend every week generating new headlines about himself. In a +20 Trump seat that should not be in play, that is enough if the Republican nominee keeps handing Democrats material.

None of this means Constantino cannot still win. Money, the Trump endorsement, and the partisan lean of NY-21 are real advantages. A competent closer would have taken the primary victory, shaken a few hands, and gone back to talking about jobs, energy costs, and Washington. Instead the campaign has spent as much time settling scores with the people it just beat as it has defining the Democrat.

We supported him when he was the disruptor. The makeup tour with the officials who tried to bury him took that status away in a hurry. This should be a slaughter. If it turns into a closer shave than it ever should have been, it will not be because the district changed. It will be because the nominee could not stop being the loudest person in every room.

John Solak is a Binghamton-area resident, longtime attendee of public meetings, and advocate for government and nonprofit transparency.

Sheriff Akshar, Undersheriff Davis, the jailhouse plea, and the Weitsman case against Binghamton Daily

By John Solak

September 13, 2026

Broome County has a sheriff. Broome County also has a private investigations shop with the sheriff’s last name on the door. The undersheriff has a family consulting firm that sells DEI talks to schoolchildren. That firm includes the undersheriff’s son—the same son who, as a Broome County jail guard, pleaded guilty after bringing drugs into the facility his father now helps run.

Those are not three separate stories. They are one county government with a side-hustle problem, and they sit next to the allegation that the sheriff’s LLC ran a background investigation on a defendant in Adam Weitsman v. John Solak, Jessica Miller-Cice, and Binghamton Daily.

Fred Akshar is trying to turn Broome County into Cop Land. In Cop Land, the badge is the town. Here the badge is also a product line—and the product line includes lectures to kids from a household that already had a corrections officer walk meth into the jail.

The firm that never closed

Frederick J. Akshar II founded Akshar Consulting, LLC on January 30, 2019, while he was still a state senator. The company remains an active New York LLC. Fred is owner and principal. His wife, Jessica Akshar, is managing partner. The website still calls him “a current law enforcement executive.”

The menu is not a hobby. Akshar Consulting sells security consulting, risk assessments, government relations, School Resource Officer packaging, background investigations, civil and criminal investigations “directly with attorneys,” and process service. Rush service available.

In April 2025, News 34 said out loud that both the sheriff and Undersheriff Sammy L. Davis still run consulting firms. Akshar Consulting “focuses on security strategies for businesses and large events.” Davis’s shop is D5 Consulting Group. The sheriff of a nearly 300-person office treated that as compatible with the badge.

The undersheriff’s other payroll—and the son who walked drugs into the jail

D5 Consulting Group LLC is a certified minority-owned firm based in Endicott. Amira Davis is listed as owner. The Chamber listing is blunt about the inventory: DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), cultural competency, group facilitation, train-the-trainer, drug and alcohol awareness, risk assessment, crisis management, leadership, workplace violence / active shooter, sexual harassment. Clients on the public pitch list have included SUNY Broome, Binghamton University, Saputo, Trinity Plastics, Sodexo, and Tioga County.

Spectrum News made it a family portrait in June 2023. “Diversity is the Davis family’s business.” Amira Davis and her two boys, Aaron and Sammy, teach kids about accepting others. The piece called it a full-time job and a family business. Not a metaphor. The sons are part of the school-facing act.

One of those sons is Sammy L. Davis Jr.

In September 2021, while working as a Broome County corrections officer—academy class of November 2019—Davis Jr. of Endicott was charged after a Sheriff’s Office investigation into smuggling at the jail. Investigators said the package stream included methamphetamine, Suboxone, Adderall, cigarette tobacco, jewelry, matches, and a BIC lighter. The original slate was third-degree criminal possession, third-degree criminal sale, fourth-degree conspiracy, and first-degree promoting prison contraband. Two civilians were charged with him.

In June 2022 he pleaded guilty to a bribery charge. On September 13, 2022, Broome County Court Judge Carol Cocchiola sentenced him to five years’ probation. His lawyer, Paul Battisti—later the district attorney—told the court Davis Jr. had been a high-school football star, got hooked on painkillers after a college injury, was clean, in counseling, and working full time. The prosecutor and the judge both remarked on what looked like a lack of accountability in his earlier statements. He admitted that, as a guard, inmates approached him and he agreed to bring a package inside that turned out to contain contraband.

Sammy L. Davis the father was appointed undersheriff in 2023. He oversees staff and budget for the same office that runs the same jail. The Sheriff’s Office used Black History Month 2024 to celebrate him as a lifelong educator. He teaches life-skills inside the facility. His family firm teaches DEI and drug-and-alcohol awareness to students on the outside. His son, the former guard who pleaded out of a jail-smuggling case, is part of that school circuit.

That is not “moving on.” That is putting the household back in front of children and calling it consulting.

Cop Land, with an SRO contract

Akshar’s public pitch is school safety. His private pitch is the same inventory. Akshar Consulting has sold an SRO program. The county job description for School Resource Officer–Supervisor says the work is assisting the sheriff in day-to-day SRO operations—assigning, inspecting, scheduling part-time deputies in local buildings, overseeing school-based investigations.

The SRO program started in 2016 under the District Attorney’s Office. By 2023 the DA counted eight districts and 24 SROs. Then the sheriff’s office moved into the same market. PressConnects put the headcount near 25 officers in Broome schools. The sheriff’s Facebook feed is a yearbook of BCSO SROs welcoming children back to class.

That is how you become the single-source provider without stamping “monopoly” on a resolution. You take the county pipeline. You staff the buildings. You keep a private LLC that still markets SRO services. Districts that want an armed adult in the hallway shop Broome County law enforcement—and the man at the top still owns the consulting brand that sells the same product.

Now add D5. The undersheriff’s family firm also sells itself into schools: DEI, cultural competency, drug awareness. The same household that produced a jail guard who pleaded guilty to helping contraband through the gate now lectures students. Akshar’s office puts deputies in the building. Davis’s firm puts a curriculum in the building. The kids get Cop Land with a worksheet.

What friends are for

Weitsman filed on September 3, 2025. Index No. EFCA2025002780. Benesch put the papers on the Broome docket. The case is a private civil action by a scrap-yard owner against local critics. It is not a Sheriff’s Office case.

On September 5, 2026, Binghamton Daily wrote that Akshar’s LLC was investigating us for Weitsman’s benefit. Three days later: did the sheriff misuse authority under color of law by running a complete background investigation of the defendant in Weitsman’s defamation case? Color of law is the phrase the civil-rights statutes use when a person with a badge uses the office—or the appearance of the office—for a private end.

Akshar Consulting’s site tells attorneys it will run backgrounds, locate witnesses, and give a law firm “a substantial advantage when entering the courtroom.” Weitsman is the kind of client who buys products like that. Years earlier, Binghamton Daily asked why Akshar had accepted over-limit contributions from Weitsman entities and then returned them.

A sitting sheriff does not get to run a PI shop against a county resident in a pending Broome Supreme Court case and then pretend the badge and the LLC live on different planets.

Cice’s letter to the judge

Jessica Miller-Cice did not wait for someone else to describe her. On September 30, 2025, she filed a sworn affidavit—NYSCEF Doc. No. 48. A letter to the judge in the only form a pro se defendant is allowed: under oath, on the docket.

She told Justice McBride who she is. A mother of two. A small-business owner in Broome County. Appearing for herself. Her commentary, she said, concerned matters of public interest—charitable donations, NIL funding, Syracuse athletics. The statements attributed to her were based on public reporting and on Weitsman’s own public claims. She denied actual malice. She said his claim of reputational harm was speculative; his reputation was already a public argument.

Cice put her name on a page and handed it to the court. She did not hire a national firm. She did not hire the county sheriff’s side business. She did not ask a man with a badge to build a file on the other side.

The two-clock problem, now with a third badge

Weitsman’s lawyers already ran two clocks in the same caption—a long discovery calendar of their own drafting, then a short sprint to default against a visually impaired pro se defendant. Add a third clock: the time it takes a sitting sheriff’s private firm to compile a “complete background investigation” of the person being sued, while that person’s ADA request sat in a clerk’s lost-and-found.

If Akshar Consulting was running backgrounds for Weitsman’s benefit, the complaint was not only a pleading. It was a work order.

What the county is owed

No one elected Fred Akshar to sell investigations to scrap dealers. No one elected Sammy Davis to keep a family DEI brand in the schools after his son, as a guard in the jail they both answer for, pleaded guilty to helping a package of meth and pills through the gate. No one elected either man to make Broome County the single-source vendor for school cops and school lectures.

Cice wrote to the judge. I wrote to the Appellate Division. Weitsman wrote a $5 million caption. Akshar wrote a business plan in 2019 and never tore it up. The Davis family wrote a consulting catalog and put the son who pleaded out of the jail case back in front of students.

Broome County does not need Cop Land. It needs a sheriff who is only a sheriff, an undersheriff whose family firm is not the diversity vendor for the same kids his office polices, and a consulting industry that does not get to investigate the defendants in a case pending in this county’s courthouse.

John Solak is a Binghamton-area commentator and a defendant in Weitsman v. Solak et al., Index No. EFCA2025002780 (Sup. Ct. Broome County). Jessica Miller-Cice’s September 30, 2025 affidavit is on the public NYSCEF docket. Sammy L. Davis Jr.’s 2021 charges and 2022 bribery plea and probation sentence were reported by WIVT and WICZ. D5 Consulting’s DEI offerings and the Davis family’s school presentations were reported by the Greater Binghamton Chamber and Spectrum News. Allegations that Akshar Consulting performed investigative work for the Weitsman side are based on the author’s public statements and on the firm’s advertised services; they have not been adjudicated. A notice of appeal has been filed. An omnibus motion remains pending. Nothing here is legal advice