Wagstaff pays off IRS lien in DA's race, Lawler gets big thank-you in Mahopac for grant

What will taxpayers get for their $5.5 million investment in the town of Carmel’s Swan Cove project in downtown Mahopac?

They’ll get 82 parking spaces, 18 of which are reserved for the adjacent Tompkins Community Bank.

They’re promised some sort of protection against the incursion of water from Lake Mahopac so the parking spaces don’t get flooded during heavy rains.

And they’ll get picnic tables on a half-acre of lawn with a canoe launch site by the lake.

For now, they’ve also gotten a 4-foot by 8-foot sign thanking Rep. Mike Lawler for securing an additional $2 million in federal aid to help with the project. That’s comes on top of $1.5 million from the town’s allocation under the 2021 American Rescue Plan, enacted during the COVID pandemic.

The town has already invested more than $2 million of local tax money into the site for land purchases, environmental remediation, and studies on what to do with the land and how to stop the flooding.

As a Mahopac resident, the Lawler sign caught my eye because it heralded the Swan Cove funding for a project located in “downtown Carmel.” I surmised that the sign was designed by an out-of-towner who didn’t know that downtown Carmel was 5 miles east on Route 6, over by the Putnam County Courthouse and Lake Gleneida.

Swan Cove, meanwhile, remains in downtown Mahopac, not in downtown Carmel.

Wagstaff and the IRS

Running for elective office opens up your life to public scrutiny.

That brought this week’s research into a federal tax lien placed on civil rights attorney William O. Wagstaff’s Mount Vernon condominium in 2022. It turned out the Mount Vernon Democrat who wants to be Westchester County’s next district attorney had back taxes he owed for the first six years of his time as a practicing attorney – from 2015 to 2020.

I’d heard a snippet about the tax lien last week in the three-day trial over his election petitions. Attorneys for former Supreme Court Justice J. Emmett Murphy had tried to bring the tax lien into evidence to reflect on Wagstaff’s credibility in the petition case.

Wagstaff’s co-counsel Marty Connor objected, and Justice Paul Marx agreed: the tax lien had no relevance to the petition case, which Wagstaff won.

However, it piqued my interest. Was the tax debt still outstanding as Wagstaff campaigned to become Westchester’s next chief prosecutor? Or had Wagstaff come up with the cash to square things with the taxman in Washington, D.C.?

I obtained the lien document, finding that he owed the IRS $189,112 for six years of back taxes – from 2015 to 2020, during his six first years as an attorney.

Then I discovered that he’d paid the debt on March 20 as he and his supporters were out collecting 6,000 signatures to get on the June 25 ballot.

How did he come up with the money?

It turns out a civil rights case he’d filed regarding the suicide death of Brandon Rodriguez in a Riker’s Island jail cell in 2021 had concluded. Rodriguez’s next of kin received a $2.25 million award, of which Wagstaff received $759,000 on Jan. 3. Eleven weeks later, the debt was gone as the campaign heated up.

Reach out

I love to hear from readers with feedback or tips on a corner of the public sphere that could use some sunlight. You can reach me at dwilson3@lohud.com.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Wagstaff pays off IRS lien in DA's race, Lawler gets big thank-you in Mahopac for grant