What will traffic and travel look like in Lower Hudson Valley for the partial eclipse?
PHIL REISMAN

Reisman: The week Yonkers went bonkers

Words that will live in infamy: 'Don't (expletive) tell anybody'

Phil Reisman
preisman@lohud.com
Columnist Phil Reisman

The week that was in Yonkers was a packed buffet of bad-tasting weirdness.

Let us belly up to the groaning board and review the broccoli.

YFT Punked. The two top officials of the Yonkers Federation of Teachers, the powerful union that represents the city’s public school teachers, were ensnared in an embarrassing video trap set by a conservative provocateur known for his Candid Camera-style tactics.

YFT President Pat Puleo and Vice President Paul Diamond were duped into thinking that a visitor to their offices was a Yonkers teacher seeking advice on how to handle a “hypothetical” — wink, wink — situation involving a racial slur and a bloody altercation with a student.

YFT President Pat Puleo.

Though the 17-minute video was sophomoric and looked as if it were edited with a meat cleaver and Scotch Tape, it effectively damned Puleo and Diamond as a couple of hacks willing to help cover up a possible case of child abuse. When the fake teacher said he took an unauthorized leave of absence amounting to a two-week vacation in Mexico, Puleo  essentially told him to make up a lie — something about a member of his family being kidnapped by drug dealers.

She offered an additional piece of advice: “Don’t f***ing tell anybody.”

You won’t find those words in the YFT’s mission statement, but they should haunt Puleo forever.

Councilman Mike Breen, a Republican, noted that the YFT scandal is especially disturbing “in light of the city’s recent budget crises caused by misassumption of funds at the Board of Education.” Last year, that misassumption prompted the state to bail out the city to the tune of $25 million.

Breen might have added, too, that the Puleo-Diamond F-grade in ethics can’t help Mayor Mike Spano’s uphill effort to get the state to reimburse as much as 98 percent of a $2 billion plan to rebuild the city’s crumbling schools.

Yonkers City Council voted 4-3 to exceed property tax cap.

Taxes Increased. Just hours after the Republican majority of the City Council called for Puleo and Diamond to resign, the council passed a $1.1 billion budget by a 4-3 vote.

To do this, they rejected the mayor’s proposal to double the city’s tax on home sales from 1.5 percent to 3 percent. Instead, they raised the property tax by 4.2 percent, exceeding the tax cap.

REISMAN: Is Yonkers becoming the 'new Detroit?'

SPANO TO REISMAN: Yonkers is a million miles from Detroit

Maybe this was a Hobson’s Choice — maybe. But no matter what poison you choose, the tax increase underscored a couple of things.

First, it demonstrated once again that the city is in constant financial turmoil and its leaders are running out of new and creative ways to squeeze nickels and dimes from its hardworking citizens.

Second, the property tax increase brings up a frustration felt by many Yonkers residents. It comes in a year when the city council and staffers in the mayor’s office were given generous pay raises. An argument could be made that those raises were well deserved and long overdue.

However, the fact that the municipal payroll is filled with jobholders who are related, one way or another, to the mayor as well as several sitting council members gives the impression that City Hall is one big family affair, and that family always comes first — perhaps even at the expense of the taxpayers.

Fire Commissioner Returns. In a busy week, this bit of news got scant attention. Slipped in between the workaday Sturm und Drang, was the surprising reappointment of Robert Sweeney as acting fire commissioner.

The highly respected Sweeney was first made commissioner in 2012, but left two years later to become chief of staff in the New York City Fire Department.

Robert Sweeney is back as fire commissioner in Yonkers

Now he’s back, with an annual salary of $200,000.

REISMAN: Yonkers Fire duel under investigation

REISMAN: Suspensions given in Dunwoodie dustup

Of course, there’s much more to this story. Buried deep within the mayor’s press release was a terse mention of the man Sweeney replaced — John Darcy.

Darcy stepped down to become an assistant chief. This means a considerable drop in salary, from $180,000 to $128,000. However, according to mayoral spokeswoman Christina Gilmartin, he should see his salary go up to $149,000 on July 1, when the terms of a new contract with the Uniformed Fire Officers Association goes into effect.

Darcy was not popular with the rank-and-file. Six months ago, he got into a fight with a fire lieutenant at a Christmas party held at the county-owned Dunwoodie golf facility. Both men were disciplined with brief suspensions.

Gilmartin said Darcy’s return to the front lines was his decision alone, and had nothing to do with the bizarre incident.

This may be taken with a grain of salt.

As Barry McGoey, the president of the Local 628 of the firefighters union observed, “It’s always about politics and how things will appear.”