The Patty Roggeveen Conflict Watch Continues.

This just gets screwier and screwier, people.

You will recall back before the Land Bank met in August, Dreamland Executive Director (Who is also the Selectman Chair), Patty Roggeveen announced days earlier that she would be making a proposal to the Land Bank, in which the Land Bank would pay $2.5 million in exchange for a seat on the Dreamland Board and a fraction of an acre of the Dreamland Lot facing the Easy Street Basin so that they could create a pocket park.

$2.5 million dollars is a lot of money. Especially for a piece of property within the historic waterfront area that is subject to Chapter 91 regulations and has to be open to the public anyway.

But I give Patty some credit. She has some major cajones to go to the Land Bank and expect them to pay $2.5 million for essentially the rights to secure a piece of land for the public that the public already has rights to. That would have been a sweet deal. It’s like me selling a part of the common cu de sac to my neighbor for $10,000 — a piece of road that, as a member of our neighborhood, he partially owns already. Cool if you can pull it off.

Fortunately for the people and not so much for Patty, the Land Bank asked their legal counsel, a representative from Deutsch Williams, what they thought in executive session (Where Patty was present) and the Deutsch Williams opinion was that this was not money well spent. And the Land Bank demurred. It’s not in keeping with Land Bank policy to purchase land that is already protected. Fine. All is well, right?

Well not so much.

You see, then Patty Roggeveen, in her capacity as Dreamland Director, was quoted in the I&M saying, “My sense is that they (The Land Bank) are wrong and they’re not getting the right advice from Deutsch Williams, for whatever reason.”

This is not the first time Patty has been critical of Deutsch Williams. She ran for selectman on a platform of reforming legal costs. Her premise all along has been that the town has been overcharged by Deutsch Williams. As a selectman, she, along with Selectman Brian Chadwick and Town Manager Libby Gibson (who has a major grudge against Deutsch Williams partner, Paul DeRensis after he provided a legal opinion a few years back saying that Libby’s husband, Charlie could not be hired as police chief as long as Libby was the Town Administrator/Manager) spearheaded an effort to get a third-party consultant to do an overview of our legal spending. (You can read that by clicking below.) The upshot of the consultants report was that Deutsch Williams was not overcharging. In fact, the report showed that the town is getting a good deal. According to DeRensis, much of the work the firm now does for the town is at below cost due to the intricacies of the retainer situation. The reasons for any historic overages in legal spending, according to the report, are due largely to mismanagement by the town administration. Ouch. Holy Backfire, Batman.

(By the way, the “for whatever reason” added to the end of Patty’s newspaper quote above is a nice, albeit somewhat slimy, touch. It implies that Deutsch Williams may have made their legal determination for a reason other than to provide proper legal counsel to the Land Bank. She’s implying that the legal advice is politically motivated. Which is rather ironic, given what happened next.)

This week, at the BOS meeting, a meeting where Patty had been questioned on her many conflicts by Selectman Whitey Willauer, Patty pushed for a vote to oust Deutsch Williams by asking for a formal RFQ to seek new legal counsel for the town. The vote passed 4-0.

So to recap:

Patty has it out for Deutsch Williams. Deutsch Williams provides a legal opinion to the Land Bank that would deny Patty’s non profit $2.5 million. Patty publicly trashes Deutsch Williams in the newspaper and implies that they are not operating in accordance with their charge as legal counsel. Patty votes to fire Deutsch Williams.

I’m not sure, but I think that matches the textbook definition of a conflict. And a $2.5 million dollar one at that.

Michael Kopko, was sick in the hospital with a fever and a nasty blood infection Wednesday night and was not in attendance. Interestingly, Kopko sent a formal letter to Patty and the Board asking her to seek a determination with the state ethics commission on Patty’s dealings with the Land Ban before Wednesday Night’s vote. (You can read that email below.)

And it just keeps getting screwier. YACK on.

Legal Services Report: NantucketFinalDraftlegal0510.pdf