His mother was seated in the front row. Representatives from Senator Schumer’s and Gillibrand’s offices sat behind them. So too were other officials from state, county and municipal levels, as well as executives from the business and non-profit sectors. It must have been over a couple dozen in all, who had driven up to an hour or more to the small Hudson River city of Newburgh on a cold Monday night in January to watch a man get sworn in to a job that hadn’t a few short weeks earlier. The city had moved the Council Meeting from City Hall to the recreation center just to fit them all.
One by one, council members came out to take their , the mayor first: strutting as he does in his le trois-pièces du jour, as if onto a stage, chest thrust up and forward, in the manner of a peacock with his feathers splayed. The mayor roll-called the VIPs as the room filled to capacity. Some took to the podium one after the other to offer a few words.
Then the moment arrived. Mike Neppl stood, raised his right hand, and BOOM, the city had a brand spanking new … Deputy City Manager.
Neppl talked about his roots. Fifth-generation Newburgh. Humble beginnings. Coming home to serve. Coming home to lead. Look at what Newburgh has accomplished so far. The dignitaries nodded. The audience clapped. The mayor beamed. He splayed a little wider. The city manager, Todd Venning, sat at the end of the head table, Cheshire Cat smile dripping from his face, looking like a man whose plan had come together.
With the ceremonial proceedings concluded, BOOM again: just like that, as if to a dog’s whistle, Neppl and his entourage stood up, put on their coats, and walked out the door.
Some of those remaining turned to each other, as if they were collectively thinking: “That is some little club they have there. And we ain’t in it.”
But the Council Meeting wasn’t over. It was just starting.
The Blue Screen
Four days earlier, on January 8, the Newburgh City Council held a work session. Before conducting any public business, they went into executive session—private, closed to the public.
The stated reason, per the agenda: “the medical, financial, credit or employment history of a particular person or corporation, or matters leading to the appointment, employment, promotion, demotion, discipline, suspension, dismissal or removal of a particular person or corporation.”
The citizens—the hardy half dozen or so who showed up to observe the evening’s proceedings — sat in the room for two hours staring at two flat screen monitors that displayed the City of Newburgh logo set against a cobalt blue background. For. Two. Hours. They could have been home watching Sinners and had twelve minutes to spare.
When the council finally emerged, they conducted their other business. Nobody explained what they’d been discussing. Nobody had to. Executive session minutes are not public.
But here is what we know:
On December 18, 2025, days before Christmas, the council created the position of Deputy City Manager and appointed Michael Neppl to fill it—on the very same night they held a public hearing to receive comments on whether or not this was even desirable.
That’s right. Line item 8: public hearing. Line item 13: create the position. Line item 14: appoint Neppl. All in one evening. The public was invited to comment on a job that was then created and filled minutes later.
I was there to express my opposition to creating the position, for reasons that I will state later. Seeing items 13 and 14 for the first time, I sat there slack jawed, taking in the absurdity of the situation, and said nothing. As is usual, few were in attendance: none of them saw any reason to step up to the mike.
On January 8, 2026, the council spent two hours in private discussing someone’s employment history.
On January 12, 2026, Neppl was sworn in with dignitaries gracing the event with their presence.
That calendar is uncomplicated.
What They Didn’t Celebrate
A search of the New York State attorney registration database takes maybe 90 seconds. Type in a name, hit enter.
Michael Thomas Neppl. Registration number 4720645. Status: Currently registered. Disciplinary history: Yes.
Click for details and you find a court order from the Appellate Division, Third Judicial Department, dated March 20, 2025. It grants Neppl’s motion for reinstatement to the practice of law.
Reinstatement. Meaning he had been suspended. Click again.
The records show Neppl was suspended in May 2019 for violating Judiciary Law § 468-a—the statute requiring attorneys to register and pay their fees. A garden variety offense. But he let the suspension stand for nearly six years. Why?
During that time, he founded Mike Neppl Communications—a consultancy that, as with many such ventures, and as my best searches reveal so far, may exist primarily as a typographic facade on a LinkedIn page. He took a job as Government Affairs Director for the Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors for five months. In August 2022, he was hired as Chief of Staff for the City of Newburgh.
In November 2024, he was appointed Chair of the City of Newburgh Industrial Development Agency—an oversight board composed of volunteer citizens, where his management style pressured many volunteers to resign. Those who were too stubborn to get the memo nevertheless found a way to the door. Think The Exterminating Angel of municipal governance in reverse.
Suddenly, a board meant to have 7 members of independent citizens at arm’s length from city governance was reduced to 4 city employees appointed by and reporting to Neppl himself, who justified it by saying “It’s not illegal”.
On November 25, 2024—days after the IDA appointment—he filed a motion for reinstatement. On March 20, 2025, the court granted it. Nine months later, the council created a new position and handed it to him.
None of this was ever disclosed to the public. The mayor, who—like the city manager—spits out the word transparency the way Mariano Rivera broke bats with his cutter, never said a word.
Did the dignitaries who came to applaud Neppl’s humble roots know? Did the U.S. Senator’s reps know? What did the council know? At least one of them told me they did not know that there would be a Grand Neppl Extravaganza that evening (I was later told that Neppl had arranged it himself, with help from a couple council members. The rest were apparently not consulted.). What were they discussing for two hours on January 8?
I had found some of may or may not have been occupying their minds for those two hours with a basic search.
The Second Meeting
Back to the recreation center.
With the Coronation Party out of the room, the council moved on to the rest of its agenda. The city manager gave his report. Then came the time for public comment.
About twenty people lined up at the microphone. I anchored the end of the line.
Early up was a man named Corey Allen. A Black man. A Newburgh-born and raised man. A man known to the community. An angry man. A man who has earned his anger – about urban renewal, the policy that gutted this city decades ago, including his family’s home, a gutting that after 65 years, still waits to be repaired. By whom and for whom is a topic for another day. He spoke with the kind of anger that doesn’t perform. It exhales.
Next up: a woman from the Kenny complex.
The Kenny complex is an apartment building where residents have been without heat or hot water for two months. This is January. Children live there.
The woman started talking, and within a minute or so, the meeting exploded.
Someone — who, I later learned, is very involved in school politics and lives in the town of Newburgh, not the city — started yelling at a councilmember. Within seconds, he was challenging him to a fist fight. The councilmember started to get up from his seat: to calm him down or to oblige, I do not know but the councilmember is often incendiary himself: now he has some competition. Tenants — in a cacophonic wave — surged forward, all screaming toward the head table, all screaming “Liars!”, “Do Nothings!” and … other things. Residents who had been freezing for two months were letting the council know exactly what they thought about city services.
Police moved in. They didn’t rush. They ambled, like men who’d seen this before.
But the Kenny tenants would not be silenced. The council sat. The mayor looked like he wished he’d left with Neppl. After maybe 15 minutes, the mayor decided to “break protocol”, as he is inclined to do, and attempt to intervene with excuses and admonitions, further inciting them. He might have calmed the room if he followed protocol — make a motion, get a second, get a vote, then talk. Parliamentary formalities may be boring, but their time-consuming nature has the parallel benefit of allowing tempers to cool. Instead, the mayor speaks when he feels like it. The crowd does the same.
Then, corporation counsel took her turn. Her defense: the city didn’t know about the conditions at Kenny. The public must come to them and let them know! Now that they know, they’ve sent inspectors. But they can only do what the law allows, and first the landlord must be given time to respond.
The code department? “Nobody told us: we didn’t know”.
“We didn’t know.” They always say “We didn’t know.” The law is the law: the system doesn’t allow us to enforce immediately. Things take time. Never mind that the landlord is breaking the law up and down, left and right and all over.
Nobody — the mayor, the council, asks why they didn’t know. Nobody asks why it takes a near-riot for the city to act on the fact that children are living without heat in January.
What would Jesus do?
The city manager is required by statute to live in Newburgh. It is strongly suspected that only his rent checks reside at that apartment in Ward 1, constituting a taxpayer subsidy to one lucky landlord.
Jesus would live here. I am sure many say He does.
There’s a quote from Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation: “My neighbor is not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.” Gutiérrez isn’t talking about helping whoever stumbles onto your doorstep. He’s saying you go find the people who need help. You walk their streets. You know their names. You place yourself in their path, in their shoes.
If the city manager lived here—actually lived here, walked the blocks, talked to the people in the street, knew the buildings, talked to the tenants—would the Kenny complex have gone two months without heat before anyone in city government noticed?
Maybe that’s the problem. Nobody whose job it is to know lives close enough to find out.
What would Christine do?
Christine Amato has deep roots in the city and now runs her family’s real estate business. She has experience. Relevant experience. She was one of the people who left the IDA under Neppl’s management—after about a decade of service. Her stated reason? She wouldn’t be part of something the city wanted to do that she believed was at best problematic. She is civic minded, but not the type to insert herself into politics. She once did run for ward 1 councilmember, as an independent. The experience shook her and she has yet to try again.
Nevertheless, there she stood with the first constructive observation of the Kenny problems. Didn’t the Kenny complex receive a 30-year PILOT? If so, she said, the city should have and should use its leverage. She asked about claw-back clauses—doesn’t the agreement require certain conditions, and if they’re not met, can’t the city revoke the PILOT retroactively, place a lien, seize the property? She insisted that the city should be in a position to apply real pressure.
Chrissie is among many long-timers who believe developers bully the city into handing out PILOTs like Halloween candy — and that the city lets them, because officials are so insecure that they think no one else will build here.
What I Said
It was time for my three minutes.
I announced that I was using the moment to file an ethics complaint against the city manager.
The city manager is an attorney. He may have violated Rule 8.4, which prohibits conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation. I first raised the matter in the mayor’s office in November 2024. The mayor indicated he personally would not tolerate such conduct. He took no action. Since the ethics complaint goes first to the desk of the very city manager who is the subject of the complaint before going to an ethics committee that has been lacking 3 of its 5 members for years, leaving it without a quorum, I stated that I was aware that for now, at best I am laying down a record.
I mentioned my six outstanding FOILs—unanswered for months, in violation of the law—and the eleven more I would be filing, starting that night.
Then I turned to the Kenny tenants. Councilperson Tamika is new, but she is hitting the ground running: she was the only councilperson with several specific and constructive recommendations, such as bringing in mobile boilers until the permanent ones are fixed and sending the bill to the landlord. I commended her, and added that the nightmare might not have come to pass if the council had hired three code inspectors instead of wasting salary on an executive vanity hire: I am here referring to the deputy city manager position that I had intended to critique back on December 18. I concluded with a personal story: about how decades ago, I was one of ten thousand loft tenants, mostly in Manhattan, who went on rent strike against hundreds of landlords simultaneously. Our effort kept tens of thousands in their homes: about equal to or exceeding the population of Newburgh. We wrote groundbreaking landlord tenant law. If they wanted to know how that was done, they can find me through their councilperson.
I walked to the clerk and handed her the ethics complaint and a FOIL request on Neppl’s vetting, and left. As I reached my car, I opened my mobile and hit send—my remarks, the ethics complaint, the FOIL—to every councilmember and the mayor. In case they weren’t paying attention.
What the Dignitaries Saw
The people who came to celebrate Michael Neppl saw a ceremony. They saw a fifth-generation Newburgh native coming home to serve. They saw dignitaries and applause and the trappings of civic achievement. Then they put on their coats and left.
They didn’t see Corey Allen.
They didn’t see the Kenny tenants.
They didn’t see an attendee challenge a councilmember to a fight, or the councilmember rise, or the police amble over like it was all part of the routine.
They didn’t hear corporation counsel explain that the city didn’t know.
They didn’t hear Christine ask about clawbacks.
They didn’t hear anyone cite Rule 8.4.
They didn’t hear anyone ask why the council spent two hours in executive session discussing someone’s employment history, four days before a public swearing-in, without ever telling the public what they found.
The Two Cities
The people who stayed for the show saw how Newburgh mounts ceremonies: where dignitaries come from Albany and executives come from the private sector and a man talks about his humble roots and everyone applauds and then goes home.
The people who stayed for some some governing saw how Newburgh does it: where children live without heat for two months and tenants scream at their councilmembers and the city’s defense is that they didn’t know.
On January 12, 2026, both versions were in the same room, passing each other like ships in the Hudson, unmorred and adrift.
