Dan’s Papers December 2, 2011 danshamptons.com Page 11
Postal Advice Where to Find $6 Billion? Not by Closing the Sagaponack P.O. By Dan Rattiner The postal service announced last week that it lost $6 billion last year. It’s desperate. It wants to cease deliveries on Saturdays. And it wants to close little used post offices. We have a number of old and charming post offices here in the Hamptons. Quogue is one. Sagaponack is another. It’s hard to imagine not having the little post office in Sagaponack. It shares a 150-year-old building with Sagg General Store. Beautiful Rae Lerner runs the place with authority and grace. She’ll announce when you come in (a little bell over the screen door goes ding-a-ling) that your package from Amazon either arrived or it didn’t. She may
also inquire about your family. It would be a shame to see this office or any of the other little ones close. I have some ideas for the postal service that could turn the red ink black. And I hope that somebody in authority there reads what I have in mind. The big problem with the postal service is that it is very labor intensive. Every letter that is brought in has to be put into a truck with other letters and driven on the highways and backroads to somewhere else. This means there’s a lot of gasoline used, tires worn, oil changes done, repairs made. The postal service is proud that it does this. The adage is
“through rain, snow, or sleet the mail must get through.” Given those problems, and all the other hazards—dogs that bite ankles, traffic jams that slow them down, hurt backs from lugging sacks of letters, husbands and wives yelling at each other when they arrive and so forth and so on—letter carriers are only a slight bit shy of American heroes. Norman Rockwell frequently painted them. Writers have written poems about them. And in more recent years, there is the care we give them, well earned, of early retirement, combat pay and lifetime medical care for their knees and backs. But all this is now history. A good history to (continued on next page)
BANK ON THE BRINK? IT’S A FAIR QUESTION By David Lion Rattiner Suffolk County National Bank is one of the largest banks on Long Island, but recently NASDAQ made a decision to take them off the exchange because the bank was late in filing two quarterly reports. In August the bank announced that it would not file its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ending June 30, 2011 within the prescribed time. The reason, according to the bank, was that following the end of the first quarter, management identified possible deficiencies and/or weaknesses in the company’s internal controls with respect to credit administration and credit risk
management, primarily with respect to the timing of the recognition of credit risk, as well as with regard to risk rating, which affected the computation of the allowance for loan losses. The bank said that it determined that the allowance for loan losses should be adjusted in certain prior periods and this determination has an effect on its ability to file the Form 10-Q. In response to this announcement, NASDAQ decided to de-list the bank from the stock exchange, which was something that the bank expected would happen. Currently the bank still sits on the exchange and is appealing the decision. There will be a hearing on January 19
to decide the matter of the de-listing. So the question is—what’s going on with Suffolk County National Bank? Looking at the information available, it is difficult to determine why the bank did not supply their 10-Q form, which is a very common form that provides information on the status of how a business is doing after three months of operation. That information is extremely important to investors in the bank’s stock because it is used to compare a lot of important financial information such as earnings and profits, from prior quarters and years. So why not fill it out? Is it because (continued on page 14)