Tuesday Polling Locations

What’s that smell in the air, mingling with the aromas of pizza and grilled meats and diesel exhaust? CHANGE. It’s coming, it’s in the air. Bill Finch feels we owe him another four-year term as mayor, feels he has earned it. The revelations of the past two months ought to be more than enough to convince a fence-sitting voter otherwise. Tossing Constitutional rights to due process out the window to engineer the dissolution of an elected Board of Education, for one thing. That pissed off a lot of people. Finch offered a milk-and-water defense, the disenfranchisement can be laid down to the fact many of the parents of Bridgeport’s school children are either illegal immigrants or convicted criminals.

It would appear Mr. Finch has been mishandling campaign funds for at least ten years, from the beginning of his career as a state legislator. Leaving that alone for a moment, let’s consider his “donation” of almost $50,000 to a political action committee, the amusingly named “People for Excellence in Government.” The committee is charged with distributing funds for political purposes. A little investigation into the PAC’s accounting practices revealed Bill Beccaro, the attorney who founded the committee, interprets campaign finance laws more liberally than the legislature intended, reimbursing Finch, his wife, Chief of Staff Adam Wood and his wife for shopping trips to various bookstores, a clothing retailer, and trips to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, and President Obama’s inaugural in ’09. The trip to Denver can be doped out, it was a nominating convention. The other expenditures? Your guess is as good as mine. Squire Beccaro has also been reimbursing his elderly mother, listed as chair, for her cellphone bills. Asked for comment by a reporter for the Connecticut Post, Mrs. Beccaro responded she didn’t have a cellphone and asked why she was listed as chairwoman of the PAC.

But Bill Finch is only part of the problem. Santa Ayala, Bridgeport’s Democratic Registrar of Voters, is beholden to a corrupt party machine that makes Tammany Hall look like a Boy Scout troop. Ms. Ayala, after “consulting” with Judge of Probate Paul Ganim, another party hack and Ms. Ayala’s personal attorney, rejected Mary-Jane Foster’s qualifying primary petitions for having one too many BOE candidates. The extra name was placed on the petition by Ms. Ayala to begin with. She admitted to a reporter she knew the petitions were flawed before issuing them to the Foster campaign. It took a civil suit and a judge’s order to restore Foster’s name to the ballot. The Judge had stern words for Ayala’s willful incompetence.

But wait, it gets better. Ezequiel Santiago, a state legislator and party hack, was caught going door-to-door in an apartment building attempting to collect absentee ballots from known Foster supporters. He claimed he was going to deliver them to the town clerk’s office. I imagine they would’ve been delivered to the waiting jaws of a paper shredder. And then there is Lydia Martinez, a member of the City Council. She came within a silk hair of getting arrested for ballot fraud, helping her “peoples” to fill out absentee ballots, a legal no-no. Santiago and Martinez ought to go to jail for what they were doing. Neither of them has a passing familiarity with shame. And the late Alvin Penn reached out from the grave to make a donation to EEPAC, an East Side political action committee headed by Ralph Ford, a Finch supporter. Alvin’s PAC donated fifty bucks so Mr. Ford could attend a Finch fundraiser and a little more money to cover a printer’s bill. How the corpse of Alvin Penn knew Mr. Ford needed the money is a matter for the courts.

All of these allegations of criminal activity on the part of Bill Finch and his political cronies have been documented for the State Elections Enforcement Commission. Upon receipt of an investigator’s report the commission has the authority to refer the matters to the Chief States Attorney’s Office for prosecution. Bill Finch’s re-election has been increasingly doubtful. In the remote chance he does win the Democratic primary and the November election it is more than likely he will be forced to resign from office because of ongoing legal battles.