On April 10, 2007, Chairman of the Covington Twp. Board of Supervisors Thomas Yerke allegedly purchased the township’s $76,863.39 John Deere Crawler Dozer via a phone vote that consisted of Yerke and Supervisors David Petrosky and Charles “Bucky” Lindner.
There are 410 acres of land owned by Lackawanna County that Covington Twp. is trying to purchase for recreational purposes. The land is still owned bythe county.
Yerke explained that the bulldozer purchase was in preparation for when the township actually did purchase the land from the county.
“I wanted to invest the $75-76,000 into the machine, use it, put a trail system into the 410 acres, and then put the bulldozer back out for bid. We would have essentially built the trail system for free. That was the intent,” Yerke said.
However, Supervisor Bill Willson claims that this was never the intended use for the bulldozer.
“This is not the case,” Willson said. “The bulldozer wasn’t purchased for the trail system. If the bulldozer was purchased to do trails on that county land before we purchased it, that means that Mr. Yerke counted his chicks before they hatched. We didn’t get that property. There was never any reason to purchase the bulldozer.”
In an article published in the September 3, 2008 edition of The Villager, Melissa Melewsky, legal counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, said that the phone votes present “a Sunshine Act problem. Every action must happen at a public meeting.”
The Pennsylvania Sunshine Act is meant to ensure the transparency of government and allow public debate on official matters. This phone vote is not the only incident of the township allegedly failing to follow the parameters of the act, seen most recently with several township residents being refused the right to inspect the ordinance passed to take out a loan for $800,000 to build a pavilion at the Moffat Estate.
According to Yerke, there was no other way for the supervisors to vote on the purchase of the bulldozer.
“Around the time of the purchase, we were told that there would be a 7% increase in the price of steel,” Yerke said. “I called the other board members and they gave me the nod. Bill [Willson] was one of the yes votes, contrary to what he says.”
Willson disagreed with Yerke.
“I never got a message about this phone vote,” Willson said. “There was nothing left on my machine. I knew nothing about this bulldozer.”
“I repeatedly told [Covington Twp. Secretary/Treasurer] Kate Tierney not to involve me with phone votes unless it is an emergency,” Willson said in the September 3 article. “These are not emergencies.”
At the time of the September 3 article, Yerke hung up the phone multiple times when called to respond to the allegations. After the story ran, Yerke granted an interview to respond to the allegations. Regarding the purchase, he said, “Several meetings I’ve asked the board if I get the money to buy the bulldozer — and I’ll give you the reason why we’re buying the bulldozer— we bought the bulldozer. Can I investigate and buy the bulldozer? Yes. [Supervisor] Bill Willson being one of them. There was no phone vote for the bulldozer.”
However, the bill of purchase for the dozer was printed in the September 3, 2008 edition of The Villager. According to writing in the margin of this bill, a phone vote was to have taken place on April 10, 2007. As seen on the bill, a check for the purchase of the bulldozer was dated April 13, 2007.
In all of the minutes of 2007, prior to the purchase, there is no mention of the bulldozer. The first mention of the bulldozer occurs on May 1 when a motion was made “to go out for bid to purchase a trailer for the new bulldozer.” The open vote to purchase the bulldozer was not done until the June 5 meeting, even though the bulldozer had already been purchased at that time.