Stillman: ‘Winter Knows Budget Better Than Pilla’

It sure doesn’t take much to impress the good foot doctor and former Mayoral candidate, Larry Stillman.  After all, one can get a good sense of his understanding of municipal finance if you remember some of the ideas that he floated during his inauspicious campaign.  One of my favorites was his ridiculous plan to divvy up the Town’s undesignated fund and share it with every taxpayer in Town.  So when candidate Jeff Winter threw around a few long sentences with a couple of big-sounding words, Larry got sucked in even though those sentences and words are patently wrong, misleading and fact-challenged. 

Attacking the Spectrum for failing to give Jeff an opportunity to rebut comments made by Tom Pilla in a recent story, Larry wrote, “I hope election press coverage will be held to high levels of fairness, but I’m not naïve to the potential abuse of the public trust.”
 
As difficult as it is to keep a straight face while reading Larry’s complaints about the Spectrum, there was more but I must preface the following with the disclosure that Tommy Pilla and I are friends. 
Here’s what I find to be hilarious.  In text language, I was LOL.  Larry wrote, “I believe that Mr. Winter knows the town’s budget better than anyone I know -- including Mr. Pilla.” 
 
Oh, boy.
 
I don’t know whether this is more telling about Larry than it is about Jeff but it is an extraordinary claim.  Agree with Tommy’s philosophies or not, there is not a single person with whom I have ever spoken who isn’t clear on one point that I know to be absolutely true:  Tommy has a sharper mind for finance than anyone around.  He has forgotten more about Town budgets than Jeff will ever know.  Actually, that’s not true because Tommy doesn’t forget anything.

Of course, Tommy’s name isn’t on the ballot so Larry making a big to-do about him is pointless.  But maybe the point is that the letter was really written by Jeff who was offended by the facts and used Larry to lash out rather than doing it himself.  After all, no one wants to read this or another attack letter or more negativity.   Maybe the thought was that a letter from Jeff praising his own alleged financial genius would be a bit unseemly.   And untrue.