Rochester, N.Y. --- Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks was not involved in the Monroe County Water Authority Board’s decision to hire Pittsford Town Supervisor Bill Carpenter as its deputy director. Yet, as the county’s top elected official and leader of the local Republican Party, it is Brooks who is the target of many critics of this hire.
"You know what I'm almost immune to all this right now, or numb to all this because it's become so predictable that whenever anybody is appointed to any job in the county if he or she is a Republican I'm going to get blamed and I'm going to get challenged. It is the partisan nature of my job but at the end of the day I am proud of the record of Republican-governing in Monroe County,” Brooks said Friday. “I don't think Republican is Bill Carpenter's most important quality. I mean look at his resume.”
Carpenter has served as Pittsford’s Supervisor for 19 years and his new job as the second-in-command at the Water Authority will include a pay raise. He begins the job later this month and the authority’s director Nicholas Noce tells 13WHAM News that he had been looking to fill this position for most of this year. Noce said the board meeting scheduled for Thursday, two days after Brooks lost a hotly contested Congressional race, was placed on the calendar a year ago.
Throughout that Congressional Campaign Brooks’ opponent, Democrat Louise Slaughter, made constant references to accusations of political patronage at the Water Authority and the Airport Authority.
"You know we get criticized for putting good people in important jobs and I think we've taken that,” Brooks said. “It's become the sport of politics, it's who are the Republicans going to put in what job now? And I think it's really unfair to the individuals involved and to our record of good government whether it be at the Water Authority, whether it be at the airport, whether it be here at the County. I think people respect our record here and they just want good service, all of this is a lot of noise.”
