‘Outraged’ at contract buyout, former candidate demands school board resignations

Riverhead resident Laurie Downs gave the school board an earful last night about salary and benefits paid out to former assistant superintendent Joe Ogeka in his last year as a district employee. Ogeka retired in June 2013 but was paid $376,340 during the 2013-2014 school year under an employment contract provision guaranteeing him an additional year’s pay, plus benefits.

Ogeka was the highest paid school district employee in the state outside of NYC last year, according to data published last week by the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany nonprofit and publisher of the SeeThroughNY website.

“I am outraged,” Downs said, “absolutely outraged.”

Ogeka’s base pay for 2013-2014 was $183,632.64, with the remainder paid to him representing cash payment for benefits, including accrued sick and vacation days, according to Riverhead Schools Superintendent Nancy Carney.

Ogeka’s final employment contract with the district, where he worked for 30 years, ran from 2012 to 2015 and contained an “early retirement incentive” providing him an additional year’s pay, Carney said.

Downs chastised board members and demanded their resignations for approving Ogeka’s contract in 2012 and complained that they “misled and deceived the public” when they said he was retiring in 2013. Instead, she said, he was being paid more than twice his regular pay to stay home.

“We have 50 percent of our students on free or reduced lunch. We have the lowest median [income] of any township on Long Island and you people give away $376,000 to a man that every time his name came up it had something horrific attached to it,” Downs said.

Ogeka was at the center of controversy during his career in Riverhead. He was granted tenure as an administrator subsequent to a DWI conviction, and subsequently, an associate principal at Riverhead High School in 2000, made the decision to leave in police custody an 18-year-old Riverhead High School student arrested on drug charges during a high school field trip to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. The student, Rob Pace, was subsequently released by a judge. He committed suicide by jumping onto the LIRR train tracks later that night.

“You all should be gone. Nobody read that agreement or understood it,” Downs said. “Every single one of you except Mrs. Hulse, who wasn’t on the board then.”

[In fact, trustees Thomas Carson and Christopher Dorr were also not yet sitting members when the board voted to approve a three-year contract for the district administrators union on June 26, 2012, the contract governing Ogeka’s employment and retirement terms. Carson had been elected in May 2012 but took office July 1. Dorr was elected the following year. Susan Koukounas, also elected in May 2012, took office immediately to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Timothy Griffing earlier that year.]

“I would have rather him sit there … and play Candy Crush until he retired. What you did was wrong. You sure as heck did give him an incentive, didn’t you? He walked out of here smiling like the cat that ate the canary,” said Downs, who ran for a seat on the school board last year but polled fourth in a five way race for three open seats, behind Hulse and incumbents Kim Ligon and Greg Meyer.

Under New York State retirement system rules, the one-time payments of accrued sick and vacation leave bolster the retiring employee’s pension. Ogeka’s pension will be calculated based on the average of the wages earned during the three highest consecutive years of service. But for purpose of an employee’s pension benefit calculation, an employee’s wages in his final year of employment, cannot exceed the average of the previous two years by more than 10 percent.

Ogeka could not be reached for comment.

For more on the school board’s Oct. 14 meeting, click here

Correction: A previously published version of this story misstated the statewide ranking of the former assistant superintendent’s salary; it did not include the limitation “outside of NYC.”