Since there was not a reporter at our recent special meeting regarding the village of Forestville budget on March 22, it is my civic duty to let the public know about this Freedom of Information Law that I presented to Mayor Kevin Johnson:

“I am requesting that you provide me with the last five digits of the accounts recently found with Evans Bank. I would like to know when these accounts were opened and the date of the most recent transactions. “

I continued with the following comments:

“I have the numbers of 11 accounts we had with Evans as recently as March 2014 and would like to compare those numbers with the ‘found’ accounts.

I want to make it clear that I do not believe in leprechauns nor do I believe you found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I do know banks issue statements on a regular basis by hard copy or by e-mail so you are either inept or not transparent.

This alleged $106,000 which was reported in the OBSERVER on March 17 should be budgeted to pay off the debt we have with the county. Apparently we did not need to borrow the $150,000 at 5 percent for five years which is costing tax payers $19,841.10 in interest. Chautauqua County taxpayers were not pleased with this decision. I had hoped that there would NOT be a bail out and that New York state would then do a forensic audit dating back to May 2008.

To corrupt a line from Shakespeare, “something is rotten in the village of Forestville.”

Within 12 hours I received a response from the mayor providing me with the last digits of the account numbers and they did indeed match those that I had in March 2014. So why didn’t he have them when he took over as mayor in April 2014? The Mayor also said he did not know when any of the accounts were opened but did state that the only transactions in a year were done in early March 2016 when funds were transferred from the money market accounts to the checking accounts.

I still don’t understand why we are not paying off our loan to the county in full instead of letting the interest accrue, which would be the fiscally responsible thing to do for both the village and the county.

Linda Aures is a Forestville resident.