It's been an odd week for Greene County officeholders and officeholder wannabes.
Last Thursday, the code enforcement officer for the town of Coxsackie was arrested for moonlighting on town matters while on duty at his second job at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility.
On Friday, rumors flew that Dennis Lucas, the town supervisor of Hunter, was resigning, only to be quashed on Saturday, in a story in the Daily Mail:
Asked Friday afternoon of talk that he is resigning, Hunter Town Supervisor Dennis Lucas emphatically said he is not. “Don’t believe everything you hear, and only half of what you see,” quipped Lucas.
Then yesterday, the race for Catskill Town Justice got bizarre.
Michael Smith, the Democratic candidate for the position, insisted on Monday that someone posing as him had sent an email to newspapers claiming that his campaign signs were placed illegally. According to the Daily Mail, the Catskill police have already supoenaed Google to determine the sender's identify. They except a response later this week.
Things got even weirder today, when the Daily Mail reported that Smith's Republican opponent for the Town Justice seat, Peter Margolius, filed a lawsuit challenging the validity of Smith's Democratic nomination in the race. The case came before a judge this morning.
The lawsuit claims that Smith's certificate of nomination was never filed properly. Margolius is questioning whether there was ever a Democratic caucus meeting to nominate Smith at all:
Margolius thought the timing of Smith’s Democratic nomination certificate filing was suspect. He questioned that if the caucus was actually held on July 29, why was the nomination certificate not filed with the Greene County Board of Elections until Sept. 21 — the deadline for filing the certificate?
In the same article, the DM interviews Forest Cotten, the chair of the Catskill Democratic Party, who insists that the caucus did take place:
“Just because a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, doesn’t mean it didn’t make a noise,” he said.
