Taxpayers, the District Attorney's office and the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission (PERAC) should not fall for the Essex Regional Retirement Board's feeble effort last week to right one of the many wrongs perpetrated by that disgraced agency.
Meeting on a Friday night, the board voted 3-0 to reappoint executive director Timothy Bassett as chairman.
According to PERAC, the law creating the regional retirement system required the board to vote on a new chairman early in 2009. It insists that votes conducted in December 2009 and again last month, naming Bassett as chairman, are invalid and the state agency plans to meet next week to pick a successor.
PERAC should continue with that course. Members of the regional board's advisory council recently rejected a candidate friendly to Bassett in favor of a reform-minded town treasurer as its representative on the five-member board.
Similarly we would urge District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett to continue pursuing the complaint he filed last week against the board for multiple and egregious violations of the Open Meeting Law. Friday's posted meeting hardly makes up for the secrecy that has previously characterized the board's deliberations.
The regional board is a product of special legislation specifically designed to keep Bassett on the public payroll after county government — and his job as county treasurer — was abolished a decade ago. Lately there has been talk of a new bill that would fold Bassett's fiefdom into the state retirement system. Such legislation ought to have the support of every member of the North Shore delegation.
Voters in the Essex Regional system's 19 member communities, including the towns of Ipswich, Middleton, Topsfield, Boxford, Hamilton and Wenham, have been played the fool long enough by a board that's been hellbent on improving its chairman's and retirees' fortunes with utter disregard for the cost to taxpayers.
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