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THE CHIEF-LEADER welcomes letters from its readers for publication. Letters to the Editor: The Truth About Local 372 Letters to the Editor
I am writing in response to a May 19 letter by Larry Davis, recently defeated candidate for election as president of Department of Education Employees Local 372 of District Council 37. Contrary to Mr. Davis's assertions and outright lies, Local 372's members have always been given the opportunity to freely exercise their right to vote in the local union's elections and run for elective office. The members of Local 372 have always been properly notified by mail as to the date, time and place of our elections and the offices to which candidates are to be elected. Like many of DC 37's affiliates, our local union's designated election site has been DC 37's headquarters - 125 Barclay Street - due to its accessibility to our members by mass transit, its ample size and its relatively inexpensive cost. It is the members' decision to exercise their right to vote or not. It is very sad that after having run against our president, Veronica Montgomery Costa, in the 2002 and 2005 elections, and not receiving enough votes in either of those elections to win, Mr. Davis just doesn't get it, or refuses to admit or accept the fact that Local 372 members just don't think that he is qualified to be president. It is telling that Mr. Davis reacts to his defeats at the hands of the members by being the "poster child" for sore losers, making reckless and scurrilous accusations against our current three-term president, our executive board and our members. Since THE CHIEF-LEADER did not bother to check the facts before publishing Mr. Davis' poison-pen letter, I will present them from my own personal knowledge and experience as Local 372's secretary-treasurer under the three Montgomery Costa administrations and as a member of our union for more than 35 years. Unlike Mr. Davis, I have first-hand personal knowledge of the tireless efforts of Sister Montgomery Costa and the members of our executive board to restore Local 372 to solvency and to bring respect and dignity back to our union and our wonderful members. These efforts began immediately after her first election in June 1999, after AFSCME ended the administratorship of our local union and Administrator Lee Saunders returned to AFSCME's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Contrary to Mr. Davis' outright lies, which you saw fit to publish without question or challenge, our audited financial statements are published and disseminated to the members every year in our newsletter, "Local 372 Connection." In addition, since Sister Montgomery Costa's election as our President, Local 372's treasurer routinely issues reports of our quarterly Unaudited Financial Statements to the General Membership. Here are the facts about the Montgomery Costa administration that Mr. Davis has conveniently failed to recognize in making his attacks on our president: 1. Shortly after she assumed office in the summer of 1999, Local 372 owed back rent to the DC 37 Benefit Funds in an amount in excess of a half million dollars, which represented unpaid rent for 37 months. After only three months of President Montgomery Costa's first administration, this debt to the DC 37 Benefit Funds was completely paid off and satisfied by Local 372. 2. Immediately prior to President Montgomery Costa's election in 1999, Local 372 had an operating deficit of $5.3 million. In February 2000, just seven months after President Montgomery Costa's election, the local union's operating budget was brought into balance, and Local 372, for the first time in nearly a decade, was no longer operating in the red. Under President Montgomery Costa's leadership, Local 372 is continuing to work to maintain our local union's strong and stable financial condition by controlling the local union's expenses and by carefully investing our treasury monies for the "rainy days" that may come in the future. 3. On June 8, 2000, the union's loan from Amalgamated Bank of $5 million was paid in full, almost a year and a half before the loan was due. 4. As of July 1, 1999, Local 372 owed DC 37 per capita taxes and expenses of almost $2.6 million. Little more than a year later, on July 26, 2000, a little more than one year after President Montgomery Costa's first election, this entire debt was paid off by Local 372's accelerated payment to DC 37. 5. While eradicating Local 372's debts on an accelerated payment schedule, President Montgomery Costa also fulfilled a promise made to the members during her election campaign - she sought membership approval for, and thereafter instituted in June 2000, a $7 per-month dues reduction, saving our members more than $2 million per year. Also, under President Montgomery Costa's leadership, the annual increases in per capita payable by Local 372 to AFSCME totaling $73.20 (full-time) and $54.00 (part-time) have been absorbed by Local 372 and have not been passed along to our members. 6. Since Feb. 28, 2002, Local 372 has maintained an exceptionally healthy financial position, which includes a total treasury of close to $5.5 million, which monies have been prudently invested in C.D., T-Bills and money market accounts. As a retired city worker and member of Local 372 who reads THE CHIEFLEADER every week to keep informed, I am very disappointed by your paper's failure to check the facts before publishing what amounts to slanderous accusations against our president, our executive board and our entire membership by a sore loser, Mr. Davis, who, if I have anything to do with it, will never, ever hold a position of trust in our union. Please feel free to call me if you have any questions about any of what I have written, but in any event, be assured that unlike Mr. Davis's rants and false accusations, everything I have written is true and easily verifiable, if you have the good conscience and you are reasonable enough to verify it. Hopefully, at the least, you will be responsible enough to print this letter in your next edition to set the record straight. SHIRLEY REVELLS, Retired Secretary-Treasurer, Local 372 Editor's reply: While Ms. Revells upbraids Larry Davis for "outright lies," her own claims about Ms. Costa's role in restoring Local 372 to fiscal solvency are more than a bit exaggerated, according to a top official at Local 372's international union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who served as the local's administrator seven years ago. By Ms. Revells's accounting, Ms. Costa inherited debts totaling $13.4 million, adding the $500,000 back rent it owed to the DC 37 Benefit Funds Trust, its $5.3 million operating deficit, the $5 million loan from the Amalgamated Bank, and its $2.6 million obligation to DC 37. Zach Ramsey, who served as the Local 372 administrator and later as a deputy administrator of DC 37 before returning to his post with AFSCME in Washington, said that when the international union took control in February 1998, Local 372's total debt was just $9.8 million: $4 million to Amalgamated, $4 million to DC 37 and its benefits fund, and $1.8 million to vendors. By the time Ms. Costa took over at Local 372 and the administratorship was lifted in July 1999, Mr. Ramsey said, "We probably put a $3 [million] or $4 million dent in the total debts that were there." He added, "We left a payment plan in place so [the remainder of the debt] could be paid off." If his account is accurate, then Ms. Costa was responsible for retiring only half the amount of debt for which Ms. Revells claimed she deserved credit. And while she warrants praise for adhering to a payment schedule - particularly considering the past failure of her predecessor at Local 372 to do so - doing so is not quite the same as instituting the reforms that got the local's spending under control. Ms. Revells's claim that Local 372 members "have always been given the opportunity to freely exercise their right to vote in the local union's elections" also has the whiff of hyperbole when looked at carefully. When Ms. Costa was first elected president in 1999, Local 372 members were able to vote at any of 20 polling sites around the city. Fewer than 2,000 of them actually cast ballots, and Ms. Costa expressed disappointment with the small turnout and pledged to increase members' participation in union activities. She chose a peculiar method to do so. Local 372's last two elections have required members to come to a single polling site, and not surprisingly, turnout has dropped even more, with a bit more than 500 members casting ballots on each occasion - roughly two percent of the local's membership. Ms. Revells is implicitly blaming the other 98 percent of Local 372's rank and file for not voting; we can't think of another voting operation in the United States that makes it so difficult for participants who are spread out over as large an area as the five boroughs to exercise their democratic right to choose their leaders. As we've said before, it is a disgrace, and one that should shame DC 37 as well for allowing it to be perpetuated. Besides being placed at a disadvantage by the single polling site and the benefits of incumbency that enabled Ms. Costa to use buses to get her voters there, Mr. Davis was deprived of his right to a fair election last year, and to a re-vote by a curious decision by AFSCME's chief judicial officer in which he misquoted the international union's own constitution.
Ms. Costa is no more interested in running a democratic, activist local than she is in justifying any of her actions on the numerous occasions when calls about them have been placed by this newspaper since she took office seven years ago. She has instead relied on surrogates such as her attorney and Ms. Revells to fight her battles for her by writing letters rather than responding to our questions. Whenever she wants to "set the record straight" in her own name and words, we will be only too happy to speak with her and present her account. |
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