WATERBURY, Conn. – A former mayor who is serving 37 years on federal child sex charges claims the city owes him tens of thousands of dollars for vacation, sick days and personal days he never took before his arrest.
A current city official said the claim had no basis.
Philip A. Giordano sent a letter to Theresa Caldarone, special counsel to Mayor Michael J. Jarjura, demanding that the city pay him about $61,000 for 13 weeks of vacation, 99 sick days and 27 personal days.
Giordano's letter, obtained by the Republican-American newspaper, claims that Waterbury mayors earned four weeks of vacation, 18 sick days and five personal days annually, and that they could roll those benefits over throughout their terms in office and cash out when they left office.
Waterbury mayors have never had sick or vacation days, Jarjura's chief of staff, Sheila O'Malley, said Tuesday.
"It's not authorized in the charter and we're not obligated to give him sick time, and therefore we wouldn't even entertain this idea," she said. "Vacation, sick, personal days, those actually have no meaning for elected officials. We expect that our elected officials are going to devote a reasonable amount of time to their job. You spend too much time out, you just don't get back in again."
Giordano was near the end of his third two-year term in July 2001 when he was arrested on the child sex charges, which came to light during a federal corruption probe. He was convicted of the sex charges in March 2003.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox