Letter: Cassetti Supporter Provided ‘Misinformation’

Before I begin, I would like to personally thank Florida resident Kenneth Plavnicky for opening a dialogue that I feel is very important to the future of this great city. And, although Mr. Plavnicky is not a resident of Ansonia and this election will not affect him in the slightest, I am happy to see someone who still cares about Ansonia enough to attempt to influence an election, albeit with complete misinformation.

To cater to Mr. Plavnicky’s first point, in which he blames Mr. Joseph Jeanette for a 13-point mill increase in 2013, it is important to note here that the Mayor, as well as the Board of Aldermen, had very limited roles in the budgetary process at this time. In fact, Mayor Cassetti’s original platform was to abolish the Board of Apportionment of Taxation (BOAT), which is an appointed board, in favor of giving elected officials the power to control Ansonia’s budget. To summarize, as an alderman, Mr. Jeanette had very little, if nothing at all, to do with the budgetary process in 2013. That being said – Mr. Jeanette was very fiscally conservative, especially when it came to giving City Hall employees bonuses and raises with little to no justification. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsgVSVM_Ako)

Mr. Plavnicky’s next point concerning Mr. Tarek Raslan is an obvious attempt at taking words out of context, something that Team Cassetti and their supporters unfortunately do all too well. Mr. Raslan’s comments about support a tax increase” isn’t talking about taxes at all. Looking at the budget hearing from 2017, Mr. Raslan is simply expressing concern about Team Cassetti cutting the education budget, a very common theme of this administration. The support he is talking about is school funding, again, mutually exclusive from a tax increase as Mr. Plavnicky implies. It is also important to note that this was a year before the Board of Aldermen, with the exception of Phil Tripp, voted to illegally steal money from the Board of Education, costing the youth of Ansonia to suffer. This illegal seizure of youth funds caused the City of Ansonia hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, as well as hundreds of thousands in state penalties. If Mr. Plavnicky truly cared about the taxpayers in Ansonia, he would’ve denounced this, seeing that Mayor Cassetti says he does not regret it.”

Mr. Plavnicky’s last point, one that I feel is the most important and should be discussed, is the idea of nepotism within the boards in the city. Mr. Plavnicky expresses concern over overlap of family members between city boards. I could not agree more with Mr. Plavnicky here, so I am at a loss of words for when he mentions hypothetical situations, but fails to mention that we have the Mayor’s brother as the head of BOAT (a board Mayor Cassetti promised to abolish in 2013), another brother of the Mayor’s on the Board of Aldermen (a former member also being his own son), Mother Sharon Voroschak running for Board of Education while her son, David Papcin, is registrar of voters and on BOAT, as well as many other causes of blatant nepotism. If Mr. Plavnicky is so concerned about the Phipps family, why isn’t he just as concerned about the other families who populate many of Ansonia’s boards?

The writer is from Ansonia and is now serving in the U.S. military. His opinions are his own.

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