For former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato old habits die hard.
While more than 100,000 Nassau County residents and thousands of businesses were literally in the dark 10 days after Hurricane Sandy, the man once known as Senator Pothole was asking LIPA to speed power restoration to a client of his lobbying firm, a Roslyn-based insurance company that has paid his business more than $300,000 in retainers since 2007.
D’Amato was joined to some extent in this lobbying effort by state Sen. Jack Martins (R-Mineola).
E-mails obtained by Blank Slate Media in a Freedom of Information Law request, show that D’Amato sent a message to then-LIPA COO Michael Hervey asking for accelerated restoration to Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers, a client of D’Amato’s lobbying firm Park Strategies.
D’Amato, who once served as Town of Hempstead supervisor, wrote, “[Physicians Reciprocal Insurers] have not been able to reach anyone at LIPA and believe they are unaware that their power isn’t fully restored.”
He ended the letter to Hervey with the following plea, “help get these people back these work today.”
D’Amato’s executive assistant then sent a copy of the e-mail to Martins, who forwarded it to LIPA Government Relations District Manager Lauren Brookmeyer, who served as a point person for the utility’s communications with Nassau County public officials in the aftermath of the storm.
To its credit, there is no indication that LIPA dedicated any extra resources to Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers or changed its restoration priorities following the e-mails. But clearly that appeared to be D’Amato’s intent.
LIPA’s response to Sandy was universally pathetic. It eventually led to the resignation of Hervey and other top LIPA officials. But LIPA didn’t play favorites.
When D’Amato called in a favor, it didn’t respond.
Martins should have told D’Amato’s office that he wasn’t going to ask LIPA to give anyone special treatment, no matter how well connected they are. That’s not what he did.
A spokesperson for Martins told our reporter, “We received numerous calls from residents and business owners who were without power following Superstorm Sandy. In an effort to help our constituents, we forwarded the information in each instance to LIPA to inform them of the outage. When we were notified that PRI’s power was still out over 10 days after Sandy struck, we forwarded that information to LIPA as well.”
But Martins’ effort went beyond that.
In his e-mail to Brookmeyer, Martins wrote, “Please call when you can to discuss. I hope that this is an easy fix (if there is such a thing) and we can get the business up and running and literally hundreds of people back to work.”
Is it possible that D’Amato didn’t comprehend the scope of the crisis facing LIPA and its customers in Nassau County?
Did he think that his client was more important than all of the other businesses and families in Nassau County waiting for the lights to come on?
