Assessors' Nemesis Wins The Day

To hear George Simpson tell it, he is an entrepreneur whose business of supplying assessment data to appraisers and real estate agents has been jeopardized by the Town of East Hampton's unwillingness to supply him with the public records he has requested.

But according to Supervisor Cathy Lester, Mr. Simpson has been a thorn in the town's side who is demanding information it has no way of providing him.

Last week, Mr. Simpson, who balked in July 1996 when the town asked him to pay $500 for computer tapes of its assessment records, won a round in court.

In an opinion ordering the town to reduce its fee to $37.90, State Supreme Court Justice Mary Werner expressed her "grave concern" about the way the town dragged its heels and stated there was "no sincere effort" on its part to figure the proper fee until "forced by the court" almost a year after Mr. Simpson's request.

Not Satisfied

"More repugnantly," she wrote, the town chose to ignore Mr. Simpson's request "because certain town officials and employees did not like Mr. Simpson and his attitude." She said the town's conduct was "frivolous" and threatened future sanctions if it did not make a greater effort to accommodate Mr. Simpson.

"Nobody should be treated this way," said Mr. Simpson, who lives in Hampton Bays and runs Office Management Systems Corporation from his house. "They just did it because they are petty bureaucrats who relish their power."

Insufficient Data

Although the court has ruled in his favor, Mr. Simpson is still not satisfied. He said he has received only part of the data he has requested and has vowed to drag the town back to court.

"I got only one tape, about 10 percent of what I got from Southampton," he said. "At the last minute they came in and said, 'We don't have all the data you think we have,' " he said. "They claim they can't get it out of the computer."

That is the case, according to Fred Overton, the chief Assessor. While Southampton updated its records several years ago as part of a townwide reassessment, East Hampton has been doing it on a piecemeal basis as time allows.

"We don't have a program to extract that information," he said. "It's there for us to read, but it is incomplete." Because it is incomplete, the town's computers are unable to transfer it to tape, he added.

Although Mr. Simpson has offered to pay the town up to $10,000 to create a program, Supervisor Lester said the actual cost would be closer to $750,000 when the time of employees, who would have to enter the data, was added to the total.

Will Lower Fee

"We are not required by law to create documents for an individual," Ms. Lester said.

While the court denied Mr. Simpson's request for damages, he claims the delay will cost him up to $340,000 in future revenues. "My business was delayed a whole year," he said. "If you get in the market a year late, it just kills you in the computer business."

But Mr. Overton pointed out that Mr. Simpson had never been denied the information. "I don't want to tell anyone how to run his business," he said, "but if a $500 fee meant $340,000 to me, I would have paid it."

The town had been charging the fee for other firms which seek the record for years. "I think the fee was set in the late '80s," said Mr. Overton. "I will now reset it to comply with Judge Werner's decision."

Personnel Costs

She ruled that the town had overcharged Mr. Simpson for the electricity used to run the programs and unfairly required him to pay a computer maintenance fee, which should be considered a fixed cost to the town.

Furthermore, she ruled the town was unjustified in requiring Mr. Simpson to pay personnel costs because Bonnie Englehardt, the assistant, who spent the five and a half hours it took to process the data, had received time off in lieu of overtime. But the judge ruled the town can charge an hourly rate if an employee opts for overtime pay to process future requests.

In court, the town "tried to get the cost up to $500," said Mr. Simpson. "Any dope could see they were lying." He fought the fee, he said, because he plans to seek regular updates of the town's records, "and it adds up after a while."

Got Mad, Not Rude

Mr. Simpson claims he was not rude to town employees. "I got their dander up because I wouldn't do what they wanted me to do," he said. "Yes, I got mad at them, but I should have gotten mad at them, and the judge agreed with me."

Still, Mr. Simpson admitted he called Robert Savage, the town attorney, "a horse's ass" in court because he failed to process his requests through the Freedom of Information Law for a detailed breakdown of the town's bill in a timely fashion and also refused to meet with him. "If that isn't a horse's ass, I don't know what is," he said.

He also had choice words for Supervisor Lester. "She's an honestly stupid woman," Mr. Simpson said. "She has trouble understanding the most basic concept." He described Councilman Tom Knobel as "the village idiot" because he refused to intervene on his behalf.

"You can see how obnoxious he's been with the town," responded Ms. Lester.

Asked To Leave

And Mr. Overton said he had to ask Mr. Simpson to leave the Assessors office once when he became disruptive. "He started to give an employee a hard time," he said. "He wanted to barge behind the counter and go into the computer room."

Mr. Simpson said town residents should question how much it cost taxpayers to defend the case. Gary Weintraub, the town's lawyer, "didn't know what he was doing" in court, Mr. Simpson said. Ms. Lester said the town had not yet received a bill for Mr. Weintraub's services.