Greenwich Democrats Broke the Law and Got Caught!

It takes a special kind of nerve to break the law, get caught by a state commission, and then claim victimhood. That is exactly what Greenwich Democrats have done, and Greenwich Republicans are not going to sit quietly while Democrats rewrite the record.

Let’s be clear about what actually happened. Four Democrat members of the Board of Education (BOE); Karen Hirsh, Laura Kostin, Sophie Koven, and Kathleen Stowe, called an “emergency” meeting with approximately nine minutes’ notice and used that meeting to appoint a ‘Republican-in-registration-only’ to fill a Republican vacancy.

The Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) later unanimously concluded that the meeting had not been properly noticed, did not qualify as a legitimate emergency, contained inaccurate minutes, and that the respondents had not acted in good faith. As a result, the FOIC declared their appointment null and void. Despite those findings being immediately enforceable, Democrat Board members did not remove the appointee or take steps to comply with the FOIC’s decision in any way. They simply ignored it.

Yet the Democratic Town Committee tries to place responsibility for the resulting legal costs on the Board of Selectmen (BOS). The bad actors continue to insist that, independent of their bad actions, the BOS never had the authority to fill the vacancy, telegraphing that future such conflicts are inevitable.

This was never about Jennifer Behette. It was about grabbing two years.
The illegitimately manufactured seat was put to direct use seven months later to lock in a two-year contract they knew was vulnerable. On May 1, 2025, the board voted 5-3 to extend the high-priced contract through June 2028. The five “yes” votes were the four sitting Democrats, plus Jennifer Behette.

Republicans on the BOE had asked, reasonably, that the vote wait. The school budget was still being negotiated. “You don’t extend a contract when you are right in the middle of something major,” Republican BOE member Kittle said at the time. But there was a second, more pointed reason to wait: the legality of Behette’s seat was still being litigated. Republican BOE member Wendy Vizzo Walsh warned: “It’s easy to re-vote many things, but it’s very difficult to undo a contract.”

Read that again. A sitting Republican BOE member noticed that Democrats were rushing to exercise an illegitimately obtained vote before the courts could take it away. Because once a contract is signed, you cannot un-sign it. Democrats plowed through that warning anyway, using a tenuous BOE seat a state commission would later declare was obtained through bad-faith conduct.

Elected officials who knew their authority to vote was under a legal cloud chose to exercise it immediately, permanently, and irreversibly, rather than wait a few weeks for clarity. In our opinion; that is underhanded, that is a heist, that is cheating.

And we don’t have to speculate about what would have happened if the illegitimate vote had waited. In June 2026, the BOE was finally reconstituted through a fair election. A motion to further extend the contract through 2029 received a tie 4-4 vote, split along party lines – and died.

Let’s dispense with the fiction that this is “resolved.” It is only resolved in the sense that BOE Democrats were caught and called out for behaving badly. Nothing in their current public stance suggests this won’t happen again.

So, what is currently being litigated?
The Freedom of Information Commission explicitly declined to say who has the legal authority to fill future Board of Education vacancies and sent that question to Superior Court. The Board Members who acted in bad faith and broke many laws continue to argue that, independent of their unlawful actions, the Selectmen never had the authority to fill the vacancy. It is exactly this very important question which is now sitting before a Stamford Superior Court judge. This ruling will prevent such problems from arising in the future. 

Who actually ran up the half-million-dollar bill?
Greenwich Democrats want you angry about legal fees. Fine, be angry. Just be angry at the right people. Every dollar spent litigating the unlawfulness of the October 2024 meeting was spent because Karen Hirsh decided to override state law. BOE Democrats knew exactly what they were doing and got exactly what they wanted. If they are looking to assign blame for the cost of this lawsuit, a mirror would be helpful.

Sadly, this is not an isolated lapse in judgment.
In 2017, Greenwich Democrats were fined a combined $72,000 by the State Elections Enforcement Commission, one of the largest campaign-finance penalty totals in Connecticut history at the time. The infraction? Illegally helping Democrat candidates seize control of the Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET). Rushing procedure to grab a local board isn’t an unfortunate one-time lapse for Greenwich Democrats. It’s a pattern, and it’s on the record.

The bottom line
This dispute is the result of deliberate bad behavior. A Democrat BOE majority let a Republican vacancy sit unfilled for 96 days. They then broke the law to fill it with their own pick rather than allow the Board of Selectmen to exercise their statutory authority. They then used that ill-gotten seat to lock in a vulnerable two-year contract knowing a court might tell them they weren’t entitled to it. A state commission found their conduct unlawful and in bad faith. To make matters worse, the bad actors flouted the ruling, refusing to seat the lawful board member.

Greenwich Democrats are being asked to answer for a BOE chair who broke the law, a caucus that rushed to exercise an illegitimate vote and then continued to thumb their noses at the law throughout the end of the term.

To prevent future such conflicts, the question of the Selectmen’s legal authority to fill vacancies must be clarified as a point of law.