Posted: Friday, 22 January 2010 10:57AM
Talk About A Wrong Number
Steve Corbett Reporting
Disorder in the court continues to insult the good people of Luzerne County.
County judges must take seriously even the small errors of their ways or people simply will not trust them.
Little mistakes often lead to big consequences. Consider public service efficiency to be a two-sided scale, upon which we balance the good and the bad of government work. Imagine government action or inaction as pebbles placed on either side of the scale.
Good government goes here. Bad government goes there. The more bad government we experience, the greater the odds of crashing the scale into extreme incompetence.
Luzerne County government now finds itself at that critical tipping point. Any further ineptitude might bring the whole dome crashing down on us. The smallest infraction might do the trick.
So we must be cautious.
Earlier this week I placed a call to the main courthouse telephone number, looking for an email address for Judge Hugh Mundy. In addition to serving as a judge, he also serves as the president of the board of directors at the Commission on Economic Opportunity, a social service agency that receives some public finding to help people in need.
The executive director at CEO has refused to take my calls or respond to my questions about his salary, benefits, expenses, and whether he is profiting from the poverty program upon which more and more people depend in these hard times.
So far, Mundy also refuses to respond to my questions.
In the wake of the ongoing federal public corruption probe, this is no way for a county judge to behave. So I figured I’d email Mundy in a final attempt to get information that he really should be willing to provide.
I’ll tell you more about that mission another time.
But when I listened to the telephone extensions for the county judges and went through the list of numbers provided by the recorded voice, I was stunned to find that former Judge Michael Toole still had a telephone number and voice mail at the courthouse.
Toole is no longer a judge after pleading guilty to corruption charges in federal court.
Other than looming over the courthouse as an evil spirit, this criminal has nothing to do with restoring the public trust and renewing public faith in the system.
When I pressed the number for Toole’s chambers, the recorded voice apologized for nobody being available to take my call and directed me to leave a message. So I did just that, asking that somebody – even a ghost employee – call me back.
When I told the story on “Corbett” I quickly received an email from a listener. He advised me to add insult to injury by logging onto the county Website and checking out the advice for jurors.
When I did, I immediately noticed that the names of three men – Peter Paul Olszewski Jr., Joseph Musto and Michael Toole – all former judges who no longer work as judges still appeared as judges on the official court of common pleas page.
Jurors are advised to click on the individual judge’s name if they have business before their court. And when I clicked, a message appeared that each judge was currently in trial.
I made a big deal on the air about the continuing absurdity and asked how hard it would be to simply fix what’s broken, even a little piece of the fractured judicial system that has resulted in federal felonies against three former judges.
Most taxpayers understand that big jobs start small and without repairing the basic foundation of any problem, the end result usually fails.
I waited until today to see if any court employee responded to our attempts to help them or if they continue to mock the county judiciary and make all judges look bad simply for being part of an operation that nobody seems to supervise.
“For Judge Michael Toole, press eight,” the recorded voice said this morning.
So I did. The phone rang. A woman’s voice came on the line.
“The person at extension 5199 is not available to take your call. Please leave a message at the tone,” the voice said.
President Judge Thomas Burke should consider this column as a message. If he can’t get a crooked former judge’s name off the courthouse telephone voice mail system, how does he expect to handle the real work of restoring the public trust?
At least the three former judges’ names have been removed from the Website.
We’re still far from order in the court. But the judges know we’re paying attention.
If we’re lucky, Toole’s voice mail will be removed before he goes to prison. But don’t be surprised if he shows up at the courthouse to collects his messages when he gets out.
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