It's been over three months since Town of Tonawanda Supervisor Joe Emminger has investigated and accused the town’s police officers of participating in a “ticket strike,” which would be in violation of the state’s Taylor Law prohibiting public employees from striking.
Tonawanda Police Club President Andy Thompson has denied all accusations -- citing hundreds of arrests, tickets and other traffic-related operations they conducted in that three-week span the alleged strike happened.
This led to a series of rowdy town board meetings in April, which had a large crowd of residents in support of the town’s police officers. Many critical of the supervisor and chief of police.
However, as the two sides have taken matters more private, Thompson shared with BTPM how he’s looking forward to the police union having “their day in court”.
“So yeah, we've only had one conference call with PERB (Public Employment Relation Board) so far. We decided to take a couple weeks and try to settle this amongst ourselves. The town did come with an offer for us, which was not a reasonable offer at all. I don't know if I can get into what it was, but we turned that down. So now we've got our PERB hearing coming up June 12. So, we finally got our day in court, which is good.”
Thompson did take issue with the town’s investigation into the alleged strike. BTPM NPR has confirmed the law firm hired to conduct the investigation, Goldberg Segalla, has donated nearly $8,000 to Emminger’s campaign and the town’s Democratic Committee since 2010, leading Thompson to believe the investigation was not neutral.
“Not only the law firm, but the lawyer himself, has donated money to both Joe Emminger’s campaign and the Democratic Party of Tonawanda. So it definitely seems like it wasn't a neutral investigation at all.”
Emminger claimed it was himself and not Goldberg Segalla that conducted the investigation.
“No, no, no, no. The investigation was done by me. Okay, the law firm assisted me, but I'm the one who did the investigation. I'm the one who did a lot of the investigation. I was aided by the law firm."
"They analyzed some of the data with me and, you know, the numbers are the numbers. It didn't take too long. This was not something that took weeks to figure out. You know, the numbers are the numbers and the numbers show that there was something going."
Emminger didn’t deny the claims of receiving campaign contributions from Goldberg Segalla, however he still defended his decision to have the law firm aid him.
“They’re the law firm who we've been doing work with for 20 years. They know the town. They know the police force. They're the ones that made all the sense in the world to use.”
The two sides will meet Thursday in front of an administrative law judge for what is expected to be just a one-day hearing.
