By JOE LOGAN  (12/3/2009 7:24:14 AM)

While EastAurora.Org was the first to report that Aurora Town Supervisor Dwight Krieger had failed to file his campaign disclosure forms as required by the Campaign Finance laws of New York State, we certainly weren't expecting those documents to be still absent on the NYS election website close to five weeks after the election.

Some of you have asked "Why do you care, the election is over?"  Those are the same folks who ask why we have continued to reference former Aurora Supervisor Terry Yarnall's election committee guilty plea to violation of election law two years after he decided not to run for re-election. 

Understood.

Those folks obviously aren't familiar with our stated goal here.  EastAurora.org is not an entity that simply regurgitates news of the day like many of our local friends in the media.  Our goal is to bring transparency to government, elected officials, and all local public figures.  Moreover it tries to ensure that when one of these three entities do something that harms the vast majority of our citizenry people know about it.

This is vastly different from those who do certain things that they consider reprehensible but do not affect the community. (Can you say Tiger Woods?)  Those are things that EastAurora.Org are not concerned with.  It's really none of our business.

So to our point regarding Krieger's failure to disclose those who have given to his campaign?  We are currently faced with a board that has little more than three weeks remaining in office and they have decided to pick Kelly Wahl's replacement.  The person will receive a one year term.

Obviously Krieger will have influence over that decision as a current member on the board with only 4 members.  The first thing I want to do is compare the list of 11 candidates against his financial disclosure form to see if any of them have donated to his campaign.  This is our right and if Krieger filed like all other candidates this year we would have that information.  Unfortunately we are blind to this information and cannot report it to you.

Going back to why we keep reporting on these items after the logical end of an election or a term, this is why.  If violators get by with the anonymity of their donations and file a year or years later, most news outlets forget about it and let it go.  This makes future violators brave in that they feel that as time goes by the memory will fade and they are fearless and do the same things. 

Information, both with campaign financial disclosure and the information you get here are invaluable and the life blood to honesty in our political leaders. 

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