REBUTTAL: Cadau’s report at Monday’s council meeting

In the interest of fairness, the Sentinel is sharing Shenandoah Borough Manager Mike Cadau’s report at Monday’s borough council meeting partially responding to a Letter to the Editor.

That Letter to the Editor was submitted to the Sentinel by Tony Sajone, former borough manager, rebutting claims made by Cadau.

One thing I want to say, to take care of the elephant in the room, I’m sure the folks read the Sentinel today about where we’re at and what we’re doing.

I’m going to talk to you a little bit about transparency and about how I act and how things are going within my own life and where I come from in this world.

I’m a military guy. Regimented, straightforward, right to the point, don’t take any crap, make sure we always do the right thing. Why is that important? Well, God forbid, honesty, integrity, s—, let’s have some of it.

When I talked to Joe [Boris] about this job, I took this job, what I did, I went into this job with an open eye. An open eye in taking a look.

I walked into an office that was without a doubt one of the most unorganized, unprofessional, I can’t even imagine when I walked into this office and see it exactly what it looked like.

I come from the corporate world. We’re a business. Regardless of any way we look at it, it’s like a $3 Million budget, we have to manage this appropriately.

The taxpayers out there, you folks out there, are the ones that we have to go ahead and open our transparency to to let you folks know what’s going on. That’s exactly what I’m doing.

The last few meetings, I haven’t talked about my predecessor, but this time I’m going to talk about him.

Tony Sajone had done a lot of things in this borough that were detrimental or mismanaged, and after I talk to you a little bit about this stuff, stuff that should be turned over that I feel as though is criminal that needs to be looked at.

We’re going to talk a little bit about taxes and the accountant update. Our taxes are so messed up, it’s been who knows how long. They haven’t been reported accurately. They’ve been reported wrong. Unemployment compensation. Stuff wasn’t reported about the MABS accounts. Berkheimer was reported wrong. All out 941s that have to be submitted based upon payroll to the federal government were wrong.

Now, we have to get an accountant to come back and help us. But guess what? Anybody who knows anything about Schuylkill County, an accountant doesn’t want to come anywhere close to our borough. Why the hell do you think they don’t want to come close to our borough? Because they’ll be culpable, because of all the bulls— that’s happened in this borough for a long period of time.

I’m going to say it. I’m under the Hatch Act. I’m not allowed to talk about politics, but I will tell you one thing. These guys [Mike ‘Zeckie’ Uholik, Joe Boris, Joe Gawrlyik] don’t get in, I don’t sit here.

I don’t need this job. I’m doing this because I love this borough and I love this community and I want this community to go ahead and survive, but what I’m seeing over here is downright frustrating.

I asked Mr. Sajone, come into my office. Any of you are welcome to come into my office and I will be completely transparent and show you all exactly what’s happened.

Now, I’m going to talk about some of these things. Liquid fuel update that we heard so much about our PPL bills that we didn’t receive. This was such a simple little project. I just called PPL and I asked them to put them in three different buckets. Three different bills, that’s all we had to do. Borough, lights, and buildings. Now they’re in three different buckets, so when this comes in, we can make sure all our bills are being paid.

But just so you all know, we’re still back on our electric bill. We’re still making up. We have to go ahead and figure out where we were and what we were doing. But 14 months of bills, I found 14 months of bills that were reported in the paper today that were in a pile of crap over in the office. They date back to 7-1-2024, they go back even to 2022.

Now I’m going to talk to you about the life insurance update. This one is without a doubt crazy. We’ve had two people — I’ll start out with a little bit of history. Back in December 31, 2020, Sun Life insurance policy was cancelled, which housed our retirees.

Now, as this was cancelled, our retirees, by contract, by CBA, are required to have life insurance up to $25,000. As I continued to go through this and try to figure out what was happening, I found out that on the Equitable life insurance policy, after our retirees were cancelled from the insurance because of lack of payment, our retirees were placed as active employees on the Equitable policy and it’s right here, right now. They were reported as 30+ hour employees per week. They were here as a classification.

I passed this over to Shane [Hobbs, borough solicitor], Shane, you had mentioned that this needs to be turned over or at least given for insurance fraud. What I am asking is this, again, since no accountants want to come here, I’m asking our DA to show up here and look at this stuff. Katie [Catizone], that’s how we get an audit now.

We can’t get a third party because I asked [Sam] Deegan, when Deegan was here, I asked Deegan to give me a loss statement of all the premiums that were lost for this insurance policy, and I wanted to provide council with a loss statement. He had a tirade that was so childish and unprofessional that he actually told me to ‘shut the blank up’ numerous times. I just hit the button. I said that’s it, enough.

But what I’m saying here is this right here is such a problem because right now, we have retirees that don’t have life insurance. I want you to think about this. I went back to Standard — we have two life insurance policies, Equitable and Standard — so I went to Standard and I talked to them about it, you know what they said? They’ll cover our retirees. From the date that they retired.

“So we’re paying $31 a month in premiums, some of them we have to go back to 2005. That’s thousands and thousands of dollars. The borough is on the hook for these individuals. This is a big problem. A real big problem.

JW Cooper, we saw this in the Sentinel about Mark Pronio. Mark Pronio was here with us last week talking about this. Mark Pronio and I, our team, we’re going to work closely with the JW Cooper in getting this back to where it was and getting it back to making sure it’s in compliance.

If you all don’t know, DEP is there. DEP was there, they came off a complaint and right now it’s their control. They did provide us the opportunity to go ahead and clean it up — now it’s okay to clean up. We’ve been working this whole process, I’ve been talking to Jim [Flail] about this but also Mark Pronio was here talking to us about that. He’s going to assist in any possible way that he can which was very appreciated.

Now, I want to talk to you a bit about Liquid Fuels. We’ve had a PennDOT audit ongoing for our liquid fuels. A few different issues that we have here for liquid fuels. One, there was a audit that was conducted I believe in 2022 and what happened, as I read through this and tried to find out, we have to replace $19,588 from our liquid fuels account and put it in from our general fund.

As I go down through the audit and I see the audit of what all occurred here, my predecessor pretty much blamed the secretaries and said they threw away the receipt. For $19,000. I’ve never heard of that before in my life.

Now, as I look further into this, on Jan. 2 of this past year, there was $100,000 misappropriated, not stolen, misappropriated out of the liquid fuels account into another account. You can’t take $100,000 out of an account and just throw it into somewhere else.

We have to go back now to track where this money was spent or where it was obligated. It just says miscellaneous debt. Complete, complete bad move.

Also, I want to talk to you about the sewer bills. This is crazy. As we continue to go through this, I’m just going to share this with all of you. Turkey Hill, $6,222. Redner’s, $20,213. Chill Out, they’re not even open, $2,122. We worked with CityShare, which is our computer software company, we’ve gone through everything we possibly could go through, I’ve talked to Bob Shumski about this, the sewer chairman, trying to figure out an avenue or a way that we can come up with a realistic formula to provide bills to our commercial companies.

Mike Whitecavage, I believe you called Tony, the comment he gave Mike Whitecavage was ‘Call my lawyer.’

What I did was, Jim Amato, he was the sewer authority attorney. I called him on the phone. It’s just amazing how everybody gets so damn quiet right now. No one wants to say a fricken word. No one wants to tell us nothing what’s going on.

So we have sewer bills out there for commercial accounts that we have no rhyme or reason why they were ever billed like this. We talked to CityShare and we talked to numerous folks and there’s no way we could figure it out what’s going on through the computer system. So, Chris McCoach from Benesch is going to come up next week sit down and we’re going to try to figure out a logical way of how this all works. Completely out of whack, out of sync, but we’ve got to resolve this.

One last thing, we are in the process right here, this loan for $1.2 Million, this was called in by First National Bank, it was called in 11-17-2024, and right now Paul Datte and all them are looking for a bridge loan [for the new sewer plant.]

The unfortunate part is this, is that this bridge loan could’ve been paid by the loan itself. You could’ve drawn off the loan to pay the damn loan. Never, should’ve we been late on this one.

Even though this loan was called in for lack of payment and the bank becoming panicky, what they had said to me was that we could’ve just paid it the other way like I mentioned, but the bridge loan would’ve matured anyway in August of this year, we could’ve went back to the bank and probably extended that longer. Project management was incredibly poor with this whole process in not moving it along.

-Mike Cadau, as said at Shenandoah Borough Council’s meeting on Feb. 17, 2025.

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