A Culture of Corruption Part 1 - Code Enforcement
I often get accused, mostly by GOP Council Candidate Sarah Haynes, of being fed information and I have been described as some sort of puppet doing Council President Guy’s bidding, devoid of my own free will. She states this confidently without any sort of evidence or inside information into my friendship nor regarding my communications with Council President Anna Guy, and she’s not a stranger to fabricating fairy tales.
If my father were still alive, he’d assure you no one tells me what to do. As a child, I was in the gifted program. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Forensic Chemistry that included coursework in criminalistics, criminal justice, and analytical chemistry. I also have a Master’s in Social Work, so I am well versed in problem solving, reading and analyzing legislation and public policy, and am trained in various therapeutic interventions including cognitive behavior therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy. Simply put, I solve puzzles and read people. And no one tells me what to do.
For this article, I am going to walk you through my thought process so you can see how I drew my conclusions and understand why I filed so many darn Right-to-Know requests.
First and foremost, this borough is not very big, the budget is not tremendous, and there isn’t much going on. That’s why the arrogance and condescending demeanor, and sometimes outright nastiness, in which myself and other residents were treated, primarily by councilwoman Shirley Purcival, former councilmen Nick Capobianco and Eric Long, and former borough secretary Linda Higgins, struck me as suspicious.
A Democratic majority in January 2022 meant we could finally submit a Right-to-Know (RTK) request and it could be granted and sent to you electronically, instead of the borough office denying your request or punitively charging you to print each page. At the root of all political corruption is money, so that’s naturally the best place to start.
Who’s Getting Paid and How Much?
In May 2022, Lisa Cocchiarale submitted a RTK for the employee salaries paid 2019-2021. This is where I learned that Nick Capobianco was paid over $40K for being a part-time code enforcement officer in 2021, even though the 2021 budget only assigned $19,665 for the code enforcement salary. So how did he take home more than double his pay? I combed through the borough codes to look for other ways he might be collecting additional money.
§ 119-6 Inspections; property sales and transfers; leased property; fees.
A review of §119-6 indicates the code enforcement officer (CEO) can collect additional income through use and occupancy inspections and the annual rental safety inspections. What jumped out to me immediately was the number of times this specific code has been revised - 3 times since Capobianco hired himself to be the CEO in 2016. My next RTK request was for the meeting minutes from the months these changes were enacted, as well as the preceding month, to see if there was any documentation of the discussion around them, and if Capobianco abstained from the vote given he’d benefit financially (SPOILER ALERT: He didn’t). I also submitted a request for a copy of the ordinances that outlined the changes to this code. Admittedly, I was annoyed to get back queries of the borough code where these ordinances were cited, instead of the ordinances themselves. I submitted two new RTK’s, more specific this time: one for the complete change history of §119-6 and another for §119-7. The borough doesn’t have a reputation for stellar recordkeeping, so I wasn’t surprised to see some ordinances simply state the previous version was deleted in its entirety and replaced with the new instead of actually outlining the changes that were made. I did my best trying to make sense of the mess, summarizing the changes to §119-6 here.
The short version: Ordinance 545, passed in October 2017, grants the code enforcement officer $30 per occupancy inspection and $25 per reinspection for all transfers of property ownership. In addition, he will now collect half of all rental license and safety inspection fees for leased properties - fees that were previously paid to the borough.
This is where I’ll remind you that code enforcement is already collecting a salary - not an hourly wage - a salary - so Capobianco is already being paid for his time (whether he’s working or not), and now he is getting paid extra to do a job he’s already being paid to do.
*Unclear whether Capobianco voted to adopt Ordinance 538, as several pages of the December 2016 minutes are missing. It is unlikely however that he abstained from voting on Ord. 538, as he did not on Ord. 533, or in November 2016 when he voted to advertise both ordinances.
§ 82-9 Fire Prevention: Inspection Fee
I found one other instance in the borough codes that the code enforcement officer would financially benefit from: § 82-9 which sets the inspection fee for fire safety inspections.
Not even six months after adopting Ordinance 545, the GOP led borough council enacted Ordinance 550 in March 2018. This changed borough code §82-9 Inspection fee regarding fire safety inspections. Ordinance 500 from April 2011 shows this section used to require a $100 fee for fire inspection services, paid to the Borough. Ordinance 550 changed that fee to $150, with half going to either the Code Enforcement Officer or the Fire Marshall, depending on who performed the inspection. Guess who made and seconded the motion to adopt that Ordinance, instead of abstaining from the vote?
Did It Work?
It was evident that these updates to the borough code would increase opportunities for Capobianco to collect additional income as the code enforcement officer, but how much? I submitted a RTK request for more of Capobianco’s pay records, and requested the borough budgets for the corresponding years from the borough secretary to determine how much additional income Capobianco collected outside of what was budgeted for his salary.
The June 2016 meeting minutes show the CEO salary was doubled from $3,000/year (or $250/month) to $6,000/year (or $500/month). If Capobianco took over as CEO in April 2016 after Mr. Schlott departed the position, he should have received $750 for April - June, and $3,000 for July - December, except when you look at his pay for 2016, he was retroactively paid $500/month for April - June.
The 2016 budget does not call out a salary for Code Enforcement specifically, lumping Mr. Favinger’s pay with Joe Ferguson, another UCC Certified Building Inspector. I requested Mr. Favinger’s pay records as well for comparison, but the borough could only produce documentation for 2015.
The Code Enforcement salary nearly tripled in the 2017 budget, rising from $6,000 to $17,500. The code enforcement salary has continued to increase each year.
2018 to $18,025
2019 to $18,563
2020 to $19,120
2021 to $19,665
2022 to $20,255
At first glance, these seem like reasonable salaries for a part-time worker, and every employee deserves a raise each year in recognition of their hard work.
From his total pay, I deducted the budgeted pay for code enforcement and the annual payment for service as a councilmember of $1,875 to deduce the additional inspection income. For 2016, I calculated the budget from April - December where the salary changed in July from $250/month to $500/month.
2016 Payroll
2017 Payroll
2018 Payroll
2019 Payroll
2020 Payroll
2021 Payroll
The data paints an interesting picture. Disregarding the way our council has grossly inflated his base salary, the amount of income Mr. Capobianco collects from inspection fees has nearly doubled in just a few years.
I verified that none of these more than $16,000 in vendor/reimbursement payments to Capobianco from 2014-2018 appeared on his W-2s as income. The ordinance changes made Capobianco an additional $1,353 in 2017. The data also shows that Ordinance 550 passed in March 2018 helped roughly triple the amount of additional inspection income Capobianco takes home, now a hefty $11,891.16.
Savings or Swindling?
It’s been said that we pay our Code Enforcement officer so much money because he brings in so much money in revenue. I submitted a Right to Know Request to find out how much money Code Enforcement has generated for the borough in fines for the years 2019 - 2021. It was a whopping $30. In fact, no fines were collected in 2019 or 2020.
Does Mr. Capobianco really generate revenue for the borough in Inspection Fees? The borough would be collecting these fees regardless. I’d argue he’s leaching money from the borough by not only collecting a part-time salary but part of the inspection fees as well. I submitted general inquiries to other boroughs in Delaware County to learn more about how they pay their code enforcement officers. The consensus was that code enforcement officers are generally paid an hourly wage for hours worked. When asked whether their hourly, part-time code enforcement officer also collected a percentage of inspection fees, one borough employee asked me if that was even legal. Our code enforcement officer gets paid a salary whether he works any hours or not. He also gets a taxpayer funded personal vehicle to use at his leisure (although I can’t provide you with any information on how much that even costs because the borough has made a practice of lumping all expenses incurred with the cost of police vehicles). On top of that, he gets to keep a portion of the inspection fees, bringing his take home pay to something that resembles a full time job.
Councilwoman Purcival has indicated Mr. Capobianco is on call 24/7. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have his personal number. The phone number listed on the borough website for Mr. Capobianco is the borough office phone number, and the borough office is not open 24/7. If you send Mr. Capobianco an email, you get an auto response telling you to call 911.
In a Facebook post from last July, Councilwoman Purcival goes so far as to say inspectors do not get paid for “permits, reinspections, etc.” Where is the nearly $20K in pay above Mr. Capobianco’s salary coming from then? The documents linked in this article don’t lie. Parkside Borough codes clearly state that they do.
The Cost of Corruption
At the January 2023 council meeting, I asked Solicitor Jay Wills why Mr. Capobianco was not stopped from violating the PA Ethics Laws and asked to abstain from votes on budgets where he was paid a salary as code enforcement officer, or on ordinances that change borough codes to financially benefit himself. Mr. Wills quoted PA borough code §1104(b)(1) that grants elected borough officials permission to also serve as an employee in boroughs with populations less than 3,000. This statute does not, nor any other statute, exempt borough officials from their duty to adhere to PA Ethics laws. I guess when it comes to borough solicitors, you get what you pay for.
The lack of transparency from the all-GOP council allowed this blatant abuse of power to happen right in front of the residents, undetected. At this time, the meetings weren’t being recorded, and the minutes weren’t being posted on the website. We’re not talking about the 1990’s when the Internet was brand new technology. This was 2016, just seven years ago. If a resident couldn’t attend the council meetings, the only way you’d know they were changing the codes was to see it advertised in the newspaper, and then it’d be incumbent upon you to request a copy of the ordinance from the borough office. Borough council did not allow for public comment at these meetings, opting to vote on agenda items without public input - a flagrant violation of the Sunshine Act.
The cost of this corruption gets passed on to the residents of Parkside. Ordinance 538 didn’t just funnel inspection fees into the pocket of the code enforcement officer; It took it out of the pocket of the licensed inspectors, and to make up the difference, they raised the permit fees from 3.5% to 5%. Raising the fees may put more into the pockets of our inspectors (who collect half), but it makes it harder for homeowners to afford the upkeep and improvements to their homes.
On November 7, it is imperative that you vote for all 3 Democratic candidates: Anna Guy, Perry Sweigart, and Theodore McCleary. A loss of the Democratic majority on Parkside borough council means putting this corrupt politician, Nick Capobianco, back in the council seat and into a taxpayer funded personal vehicle to collect full time pay for a part time job. It means giving the gavel back to Councilwoman Shirley Purcival, who enabled this corruption under her leadership. We can’t go back.
