Scott Ringer: Taxpayers are the real victims in conflict at Gunstock

To The Daily Sun,

In his letter of April 20, Rep. Mike Sylvia has made himself the poster boy for the term “chutzpah”, a Yiddish word meaning nerve, or gall, or shameless audacity. Mr. Sylvia claims that the Gunstock Area Commission should pay the legal fees of the Belknap Delegation, which “was forced to spend taxpayer funds in defense of the frivolous suit”. This premise is wrong, as it was the delegation, and Mr. Sylvia personally, who caused the litigation by threatening to remove certain Gunstock Commissioners.

Next, the request of Mr. Sylvia that the GAC pay the delegation’s lawyers is an attempt to distract the public from his and Norm Silber’s recklessness in agreeing to an open-ended retainer agreement in violation of the delegation vote limiting legal costs to $20,000.

The next item that Sylvia and Silber want to distract us from is all the legal work to further their personal agenda, unrelated to the GAC litigation. Even the heavily redacted original legal bill had one entry that the whiteout apparently missed, a reference to removal of Gunstock Commissioner Gary Kiedaisch. That gave a hint of things to come, and the unredacted bill was full of items personal to Silber and Sylvia and way outside the scope of the lawsuit.

Who should pay? Either Rep. Silber and Rep. Sylvia should pay the bill, for failing to limit the firm to the $20,000 cap and for using the firm for their personal vendetta, or the firm should eat the costs over $20,000 if they knowingly exceeded the authorized limit by more than double.

Who should not pay for their shenanigans? The taxpayers, who are the real victims here. And it’s time for Silber and Sylvia to own up to their responsibility and stop trying to claim for themselves the mantle of victimhood.

Scott Ringer

Laconia