Dutchess lawmakers want candidate Marc Molinaro to return $330K in campaign cash

A coalition of Dutchess County lawmakers are demanding that County Executive Marc Molinaro, the GOP candidate for governor, return $330,000 in campaign contributions from 67 companies doing business with the county. 

A letter from eight of 11 Democrats who sit on the Dutchess County Legislature said the same donor companies have gotten $89 million in county contracts over the past seven years, giving the contributions the semblance of a "pay-to-play" culture.  

“All the Democratic candidates for county executive for decades now in Dutchess County have been forced to run basically with two hands tied behind their backs, being sucker-punched because they don’t access the pay-to-play," said Legislator Joel Tyner. "This is kind of like that Who song: 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'” 

The legislators' letter came days after the same eight lawmakers formally requested state and local investigators to probe Molinaro "regarding possible corruption" in the county bidding process. 

In that letter, they asked the county Board of Ethics, and the state Attorney General's Office and the Joint Commission on Public Ethics to investigate $6,800 in contributions Molinaro received from Tinkelman Brothers, an architecture firm that received $70,000 in tax breaks from the county and paid Molinaro's wife $26,500 for marketing work.

Molinaro's gubernatorial campaign has said any allegations that his wife's work with Tinkelman was a pay-to-play scenario "is pathetic and groundless." 

Katherine Delgado, a Molinaro campaign spokeswoman, called the claims a "ridiculous campaign tactic" meant to assist Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the two-term incumbent Democrat that Molinaro is challenging in next month's election. 

She said the governor's campaign was attempting to distract voters from his own recent controversies, including last week's guilty plea by Erie County political power broker Steve Pigeon, who admitted he arranged an illegal $25,000 donation to Cuomo.

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“Andrew Cuomo's administration is waist deep in corruption — an eighth Cuomo confidante pled guilty this week; this time to funneling foreign money to the governor's campaign — and all the smoke screens and finger pointing in the world can't negate that truth," Delgado said in a statement. "But the Cuomo administration corruption is more than just a state embarrassment. It's an extra tax on every New Yorker struggling to make ends meet." 

Officials in the Cuomo campaign, however, have seized on the Tinkelman controversy in election ads, and remained on the attack this week.

"Molinaro is busy trading favors and giving tax breaks and county contracts to a company that hired his family member," Abbey Collins, a spokeswoman for the governor's campaign, said in a statement. "Nobody knows more about Molinaro’s horrific record of pay to play than the Dutchess County Legislature, and instead of deflecting, he should just release his taxes like every other credible candidate for public office.” 

Nonetheless, the eight Dutchess legislators, part of the 25-member county board, insisted that their concern is the running of their county government, not the governor's race. 

They said the contracts awarded during Molinaro's tenure as county executive raise serious questions about how county business is run. 

Out of town money

They said that 20 of the firms that received county contracts and made campaign contributions to the county executive's races were from outside of Dutchess County, including a San Francisco-based law firm. 

Those firms donated $134,000 to Molinaro campaigns over the past seven years, and received about $34 million in county contracts. 

Among them was Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, an international law firm based in San Francisco, that donated $5,500 to Molinaro and received $109,000 in county work.

Others include:

• Park Strategies, a consulting firm founded by former U.S. Sen. Al D'Amato with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City, which donated $900 and received $20,000 in county contracts.
• Birdsall Services Group, an engineering firm with offices in White Plains that donated $11,350 and received more than $169,000 in contracts from Dutchess County. 

“It’s much bigger than Tinkleman or his wife," said Tyner, the Dutchess legislator. "“There’s 20 different companies from way outside Dutchess County. If you add that in with the companies inside Dutchess County, that’s not chump change.” 

Facebook: Jorge FitzGibbon; Twitter: @jfitzgibbon