A couple of explanations will help here.

First, the June 6 bill is for May, and it gets repeated on June 27 because somebody didn’t pay the bill on time (note the late payment added). This sum is added only once in the "Utilities total."

Second, the payment for the Sept. 2 bill was not returned in the papers we FOILed. So the records we have show that the last bill ($30,376.31) had not yet been paid by the date of the FOIL--Sept. 15.

So for the baseball season, running from June to July to August, the cost for utilities at the park exceeded $100,000.

Right below, on the same chart,is another incidental cost that the residents have been asked to eat. The FMD police overtime sounds like charges for some kind of special squad. Actually, the acronym was chosen by St. Lawrence and his board to hide from the public costs associated with the ballpark. FMD is Firemen’s Memorial Drive, that’s where the ballpark is located, and the reason for the police presence was to manage traffic on game days. Another $102,000.00—a charge that will be repeated next season and for as long as the team can hang on in the slowly disintegrating league. Can-Am lost two teams at the end of this year.

So these two incidental costs that might have been charged to the team owners and league, fall entirely on the backs of the residents. Add in the frequent fireworks and a few other repeating charges and you’re creeping toward a quarter million.

For months now, Preserve Ramapo has attempted to get the numbers for ticket sales and parking fees. We wanted to see if there is anything that will defray the costs at this colossal money pit. The Town is supposed to get $1 on each ticket and $2 for each car parked.

On July 12, 2011, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIL) for receipts at the ballpark. The response sent back read:

"In response to your request for copies of all records, accountings, notes, and emails relating to ticket sales and parking revenues at the Provident Baseball Park since the commencement of the 2011 baseball season on May 26, 2011, please be advised that no such records exist at this time and therefore such records are not in the custody or possession of the Ramapo Local Development Corporation (St. Lawrence’s group that built the stadium)." Signed Aaron Troodler (Executive Director of the RLDC).

So, here we have what St. Lawrence is calling a multi-million-dollar operation conducting business with no books, no records. Good grief, even Enron kept a set of books, several of them, in fact. And here was the Executive Director of the RLDC claiming that concerning income from the stadium, "No such records exist."

Mr. Troodler is an attorney and is versed in the requirements of the New York State laws that govern FOIL requests, so this response came as something of a shock. The first cynical response was, "This has to be a lie. They have records. It’s just that they are making so little on tickets and parking that they can’t release these numbers to the public." This suspicion was bolstered by anecdotal information from those at the games and photographs we were collecting and matching against the attendance posted on the Can-Am site. The photos and the Can Am numbers did not match. And we were getting information from all over about the number of freebies that were handed out for each game.

We repeated this same request several times. The most recent was sent on September 15. The law requires that information like these records must be turned over when a request is made, but we have been given nothing but the excuse that "the records don’t exist."

On July 28, 2011, Aaron Troodler told the Journal News, "We’ll know at the end of the season how much revenues have been generated. We don’t get incremental payments and it would be misleading to offer an assessment at this point without the complete picture."

Troodler’s response to the reporter was the same one he was giving us—Ask me later. The season, by the way, has been over for more than a month now.

However, in the same article, St. Lawrence told the same reporter, "The big picture is we are going to bring in more than $1 million for baseball alone." He blustered further about $2 million down the road with other non-Boulders events.

Both Troodler and Ken Lehner, the president of Bottom 9 Baseball, agreed that there would be "an internal review of its first season finances after the season ends." Kind of an odd promise when you think about it. In order to review the finances you need a ledger with both sides to analyze, but the public has been told since July that some of those essential receivable records "do not exist" even after the first month of play, did not exist after the second month of play, and as of Sept. 15, still are non-existent. Note that the attorney did not say in his email response to the first FOIL: These records do not exist here at the RLDC. He said "no such records exist at this time and therefore are not in our custody." Nobody was counting the cash?

We did find out that on a number of evenings no one was counting the cars coming in to park. Maybe there are no records of receipts—just records of the expenditures, $25m bonds, endless millions in cost overruns, outrageous utility bills.

Here are a few final footnotes that would probably be funny were it not for the fact that this financial disaster will result in increased taxes that will force more residents out of their homes here in Ramapo.

In the newspaper article of July 28 about money and the ballpark, St. Lawrence was quoted saying:

"We’re trying to do what’s best for the town and these guys are home, coming up with numbers and making false accusations," St. Lawrence said of Preserve Ramapo.

Really? Preserve Ramapo got the signatures to allow the referendum that produced a 71-29 vote against funding the ballpark with taxpayer money. So for anyone concerned about "doing what’s best for the town", maybe they should have listened to what the voters said they wanted.

And what numbers are we coming up with to support what false accusations? Does the Supervisor have the numbers? Is he ever going to release the numbers?

Even though St. Lawrence has made the O&R stockholders very happy with this overflowing wheelbarrow of cash, $100,000 in new billings, that he has wheeled over this summer, and will do it again next year, he will always seems to position himself on the side of the resident ratepayers. Let O&R request a rate hike, and there he is shoving his way toward the cameras, holding public hearings in Ramapo, banging his fist on the table in righteous indignation. He’s the people’s advocate who also has raised their utility bills by $100,000 plus for as many summers as the ball team can survive. Can a traitor be an advocate?

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