A crowd that event organizers said had roughly 100 protestors revolving throughout the day gathered on Saturday at 2:00 p.m. outside the Patrick R. Vecchio Town Hall Building on Main Street in Smithtown.
“The town has acted incredibly irresponsibly these few months, giving themselves a 22% raise,” said Nicholas Cipolla, Commack. “And then when they hired Kevin Smith to work at an audio-visual job, and in addition to that at the department of public safety, someone who was at January 6, someone who has said so many hateful things online… that motivated me to come out here.”
Smith’s hiring was approved on January 3 by a unanimous vote of the town board. As it is a part-time position ($19.91/hour), it does not require the passage of a civil service examination.
“These hires are done by the personnel department, they are vetted by the Suffolk County Civil Service and are undergoing background checks by the department of public safety,” said Supervisor Wehrheim (R-Kings Park) at a January 31 town board meeting in connection with the hire. “There has been no decision made on this employee until a full comprehensive background check has been made and forwarded to the town board.”
He has not yet begun working for the Town of Smithtown.
Smith, a Babylon native, is one of the co-founders of Long Island US, formerly Long Island Loud Majority, an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an “extreme anti-government group.” The organization and its membership refute this characterization.
It has been reported elsewhere that the town spokesperson has stated it was “town policy not to comment on personnel matters. Additionally, town policy dictates that we do not discriminate in our hiring process of any kind, including one’s political beliefs.”
Cipolla stated that Wehrheim’s salary increase already perturbed the group, but Smith’s hiring is what prompted the protest over other grievances.
