In a 5-0 vote, the council elected to move forward with the pay raise and unionization of the paralegal position. However, the veto was discussed at length with both sides taking shots at the other.

“In one of the spots the mayor claims that the council negotiated with the United Steel Workers, I want to say I’ve been involved in labor for 26 years and a lot of it’s been negotiating and council negotiated nothing with the United Steel Workers,” First Ward Councilman Don Williams said. “What happened is the council asked the city attorney how to best address the council’s desire to create a paralegal position legally and efficiently in accord with the City Charter and any other applicable laws.

“In a vacuum in 2017, the city attorney created the paralegal position in conjunction with the mayor, human resource director and the mayor’s executive assistant. The council never passed a resolution creating the position and never passed a resolution appointing anyone to the position.”

According to Williams, the resolution was to correct the errors made in 2017. He claims that redundancy on the mayor’s part was part of their reasoning. And that “anyone who knows anything about budgets, knows that budgets are a spending plan not an authorizing resolution.”

Richard Morrisroe

Williams added that “the original position in 2017 showed the incompetence of the (then) newly appointed city attorney and that city attorney has continued to lead us down the same path since he has been here and continues to support the mayor’s lack of transparent government.”

That city attorney, Richard Morrisroe, responded to the accusations during Tuesday’s meeting.

“Having a management confidential who’s also in a union is hard to get our hands around,” he said. “I think a conversation should be had with USWA and with the administration in our office to talk about this further. Two, it’s a timing issue and the salary bump is kind of high and it’s not even within the current USWA contracts so again that’s negotiable. Given the current COVID-19 budget constraints in terms of how we do that, maybe we parse it out and do it in smaller chunks.”

Fourth Ward Councilwoman Nancy Nichols claims the conflict of interest concerns voiced by the mayor are false, as the title of legal secretary was in the law department for decades and many union workers held that title. She said every one of them understood the confidential nature of the information that passed through that office.

“It is the mayor and the city attorney’s lack of support for unions that led to their lack of trust in a union person being able to keep this confidential,” Nichols said. “… The Common Council will not be bullied by the mayor with his threats of lawsuits and improper practices, especially given the track record of his legal team.”

“I think my veto message says it all,” Rosas responded. “But I just want to remind the council members, the personnel committee at the time had discussions and that committee discussed the situation that we had and some of the information is confidential, but both Councilman Williams and Councilman (Martin) Bamonto were very much involved in the decision to bring in a paralegal and that paralegal be management confidential. I just want to remind the public that these two were involved in that decision.”

Following the meeting, Morrisroe e-mailed the OBSERVER in regard to Williams’ comment.

“Section 6.02 of the Dunkirk City Charter authorizes the city attorney to appoint such assistants and employees of the department within the department as authorized by Common Council,” he wrote. “It does not state in the charter that a separate resolution specific to each position creation or hire has to be done. Councilman Williams knows this. But it doesn’t suit his tired political narrative of lack of transparency.

“Since he’s obviously considering me a political enemy and intent on discrediting me, whether in conjunction with the Wendel campaign or not, he’s become a Scalia-esque strict constructionist of the Dunkirk City Charter, with his years of legal experience driving heavy equipment for the county as training. Sadly, that training hasn’t helped him with statutory interpretation, a whole subfield within the law itself. But one may want to point out to him … that Section 19.10 of the Dunkirk City Charter titled Liberal Construction, clearly states: ‘This Charter shall be liberally construed to achieve its objectives and purposes.’

“Williams, when an ally of the mayor politically in 2017, didn’t seem to mind my alleged incompetence when he asked me to handle a traffic ticket for his stepson in Brant.”