A recent letter to the Editor of the East Hartford Gazette was published May 20, 2004 captioned "STANDARD KNIEP APPROACH SHORTCHANGES THE TRUTH" Finance Director Mike Walsh has been rebutting gadfly Susan Kniep almost on a weekly basis. (Note: The above caption seems to indicate an intentional prevaricator)

"I would disagree with the editor when he says I would 'find fault in the statement that readers benefited' from the Walsh/Kniep exchanges over the last few weeks. Quite to the contrary, I write so the readers can benefit by better understanding their government.

When Mrs.Kniep writes, what I take exception to is the way she intentionally provides misinformation on a topic to make East Hartford taxpayers distrustful and angry at their government. Keeping a judicious eye on your government is healthy. Questioning public officials and solutions is healthy. What Mrs. Kniep does and how she does it is not.

Here's Mrs. Kniep's unchanged approach to government: Make call after call to a reporter... Follow-up those calls with a fax and then email them with partial snippets of government gleaned information with inaccurate portays of busines at Town Hall in an attempt to get them to write a story to inflame the public.

Make a quick appearance at a televised public hearing, malign some public official, call a local radio station talk show and tell the listening public how awful you feel about your town. Tape your own one-sided version of a cable show to re-emphasize your considerable distrust of government. Finally, run for public office.

The problem for Mrs. Kniep as I see it, is that darn four-year record a mayor. What she did as mayor does not support, and quite frankly, significantly undermines her extreme ideology of today.

As for her credibility, take her last writing in the Gazette. Mrs. Kniep asks if two checks related to the Nardi's sale have signatures on them?

The short answer is 'yes.' The long answer is Mrs. Kniep was provided with digital images of the front and backside of the issued and cleared checks. The digital images were provided the town by the bank. The signitures were too light to be digitized. However the original checks clearly displayed the proper signatures."