Nelson Benton
Things are coming apart at the seams for the Essex Regional Retirement Board.
It appears that Executive Director Tim Bassett's carefully crafted majority on the five-member board — the same one that signed the contract yielding him a 52 percent raise over six years — may be falling apart.
This week, reform candidate Kevin Merz, the town treasurer in Ipswich, won the Advisory Council's seat on the board, which had been held by Bassett ally Roberta Josephson of Rockport. Despite the difficulty he had determining just when the election was to be held and who was eligible to vote, Merz prevailed in a 19-18 vote.
Apparently, a Jan. 30 letter Bassett sent to advisory board members whining about "slanted and sensationalized stories" in this newspaper failed to persuade a majority to vote for his preferred candidate. In the letter, he boasts of the board's "record investment returns" (21.17 percent) for 2009, and accuses the paper of "turning an administrative molehill (the board's failure to re-elect Bassett as chairman in a timely manner) into a malicious mountain."
But as a result of that "administrative molehill," the state Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission is now in the process of seeking a new chairman. And it's also looking into whether longtime Bassett crony Kathy O'Leary of Salem and Naples, Fla., is still legally eligible to vote.
In the meantime, District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett has filed a complaint in Salem Superior Court accusing the board of multiple violations of the state's Open Meeting Law.
All of which could mean trouble for Bassett, who's called a meeting of the board for 6 tonight. Stay tuned.
Whatever transpires, it's hard to feel sorry for Bassett. He and wife Linda — who parlayed a mostly no-show stint on the Lynn library board into a cozy pension of her own — could write the book on inventive ways to use public service to create a lucrative money stream.
"How do they sleep at night?" someone asked the other day.
One wag's response: "Probably on a very expensive mattress."
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Local mayors including Salem's Kim Driscoll and Beverly's Bill Scanlon are enlisting members of the business community to help them lobby Beacon Hill for legislation that would allow them to determine the "design" of health plans offered municipal employees. That single change could save cities like theirs millions of dollars a year.
But it would require lawmakers to thwart the will of the public employee unions — still a very scary prospect for many of them.
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Hard to blame Republican Scott Brown for becoming impatient with the delay in seating him as the state's junior senator. When Lowell Democrat Niki Tsongas won the special election for the 5th District seat in Congress a few years ago, she was seated the very next day.
Gov. Patrick and Senate Majority Leader Reid were quick to respond to Brown's request, however, not wanting to get voters even angrier they apparently were on Jan. 19 when Brown upset Democrat Martha Coakley.
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Datebook: Gov. Patrick will be at the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers on Saturday from 3 to 4 p.m., to speak with campaign volunteers ... Salem's Federal Street Neighborhood Association and its allies are holding "an evening of International hors d'oeuvres, wine & beer" at "the stately Benjamin Carpenter House (135 Federal St.)" Feb. 12 to raise money to fight what they apparently consider a declasse housing development at a factory site on the other side of the North River.
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Nelson Benton's political column appears in this space every Friday. Read him daily at blogs .salemnews.com/fullnelson.
